


As we say our long goodbyes

by SHADOWSQUILL



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Abduction, Begging, Death Sentences, F/F, F/M, Failed escape, Help, Restraints, Whumptober 2020, abandon, dilemma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:35:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 24,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27166690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SHADOWSQUILL/pseuds/SHADOWSQUILL
Summary: Having escaped Gallifrey and the cell she has been sent in, the Doctor returns to her companions for new adventures. When she is adbucted and trapped in a wicked and deadly game, she has to pull herself back together and find a way out of this hell before it's too late...
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor/River Song, Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Kudos: 10
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	1. Let's hang out sometime

The constant flow of thoughts mixing ideas, possible plans, information from the past, present, future and what could be, recipes, maps, coordinates, symbols, names, things to do, how to impress people around her… was gone. The usual buzzing occupying the back of her mind was silent. She should have been confused. She should have been worried. Instead, she felt… Empty. Empty like a bottle you would have drunk in its entirety and abandoned somewhere after being crushed. **_Crushed_**. That was the word. She felt as if she had been crushed, and all the main functions of her body were unresponsive. A body? Had she just thought of herself as a physical being? Wasn’t just some spirit floating around? Empty and numb. Almost **_pleasantly_** numb. How long had she been that way? Wait… Who and what was she actually?

She scraped the bits of her consciousness she had access too. She was a thinking being obviously, but couldn’t form a proper thought. She could only think in short words that were actually questions: Who? Where? What? Who was she? Where was she? … Wait, she was a she. How did she know she was female? Why was it the first pronoun that came to her mind? She was an immaterial being with an ability to think. Almost a **_ghost_**. No. Ghosts didn’t exist. Dead people didn’t come back as translucent beings who could talk. How many times had she met ghosts in her life… Too many. Why was she refuting their existence then? Why did she think that she wasn’t one of these lost souls haunting places because they weren’t given the chance to rest in peace? Because she was **_dead_**. She couldn’t be **_dead_**. But why was she so certain of this fact?

She was floating in an endless darkness. Impossible to find any sort of landmarks. Her eyes were wide open but she couldn’t even see the tip of her nose. Eyes. Nose. How many species in the universe had both eyes and nose? Millions! She needed a proper look at herself. She would have a better idea if she could just palpate her own body, feel it under her hands… Hands! This was reducing the list of species. She wasn’t an immaterial being. She was a real material being. In flesh and blood. It meant she was not conscious. She was stuck in her subconscious, and she was able to control it. Somehow. She wasn’t just a basic being. She was something superior. A superior being capable of controlling its subconscious; a being with eyes, nose and hands. The list was reducing again but not enough for her to remember her identity.

Suddenly, a light. A tiny dot of light in the endless darkness. A dot tinier than the dying stars you could see at night in the terrestrial sky. She walked toward it. Walked. So she had legs. Legs and feet. Good. Another data to add to the list to figure out who and what she was. The dot grew bigger as she was approaching and soon it became a window and she could see what was going on outside her prison of darkness. A blue police box. Four individuals came out of it. Someone else would have wondered how they could have fitted in there, but she didn’t see anything wrong in that. A tall young woman with a bright smile and tanned skin. A black young man smiling just as brightly as his friend. A middle-aged man grumbling something. A short blonde woman with a long trench coat of a pale grey and navy-blue lining. She couldn’t see her face, but this blonde woman obviously was the leader of the group.

From her spot in the darkness, she followed them throughout a night out in the streets of Sheffield, Earth. A night of fun, a night without danger or so they thought. A black silhouette was following them, hiding in the shadows, watching them, waiting for the right moment to move into action. No one was suspecting a thing apparently. No one but the small woman. Her face remains hidden to her at all times, but her body language spoke for her. She was tense, checked around her every now and then. She felt the threat but couldn’t identify it. She playfully agitated a luminous tube in the air when her companions weren’t looking. The silhouette was close but indetectable. The moment would come soon, but it wasn’t now. Not yet. It waited until they all had their guard down. Until they separated for the rest of the night.

The blonde woman found herself alone in front of the police box, only surrounded by the giant dark shadows of the block of flats that reminded her so much of a night in London far, far away in her past. She sighed, said something to the police box and tenderly placed her hand on the door. The silhouette rushed out of the dark and straight to his target. She saw everything from her corner in the dark. Her instincts urged her to move, to jump through this window and help the future victim of a twisted mind without a second thought. There was no hesitation on her part. She jumped head first through this immaterial window and expected to fall on the back of this dire individual… only to be thrown in the body of the small woman in danger. She swiftly turned around to face the threat. Her eyes grew big as she recognised the face of her attacker.

The pain didn’t come immediately. First, there was a double sting in her stomach as their hand stabbed her with what looked like the phone in the night. Then, came an unpleasant tingling, an electric discharge. Her muscles contracted in answer to her nervous system being overwhelmed with a strong electric current. It was a blast for her brain who couldn’t interpret this important data that came out of nowhere. It was incapable to react and work against this unusual electric flux in her system and chose to shut down temporarily. She felt herself falling backward. Her body was paralysed, her brain unresponsive and she hit the concrete ground with a light thump that wasn’t representative of how hard she had crashed on that ground. She couldn’t breathe. Her chest was too oppressed by this tetany. Someone murmured in her ear and that was it. She was gone.

The Doctor’s eyes fluttered open. There were a thousand pneumatic drills working at the same time in her head. Her body was stiff and painful. She couldn’t help the groans of pain as she was coming back to consciousness slowly. She was faster at waking up usually but right now, something was slowing her down. Pain. Pain in her chest, pain in her stomach, pain in all her muscles. She tried to move so she could stretch and get rid of this terribly unpleasant situation and realised that something was wrong. Her body was unresponsive, but not because of the pain. It was another reason that spread fear in her whole system and forced her heart to pump blood faster. She was fully awake now, and fully aware that she was in troubles. Some troubles she was certain to not be responsible of this time. She was the target of some freaking twisted mind who had hung her up like a piece of meat.

Her wrists were caught in heavy shackles that were hooked on a frightening butcher hook above her head. She couldn’t feel her hands, or her arms. Her ankles were also tied together with the same shackles. Obviously someone was scared of her running away, but they weren’t afraid of her screaming or talking since she wasn’t gagged. A good thing. She could talk herself out of this situation and retreat until she could recover from whatever had happened to her. Who was behind all of this? Where was she? Were her mates okay? If not, she would… She would what? She was hanging above the ground like meat. What could she do in such a situation? She needed to know more about her adversary to find out what was going out around here…


	2. In the hands of the enemy

“So what’s the plan now?”

She had been taken down her hook while she was out. The fact that only one of her hearts was working was greatly diminishing her, weakening her. Oxygen wasn’t properly delivered to her brain, to her muscles and it was also affecting her brain. She was slower, vulnerable. Easier to trap and manipulate. She was clearly in a rough situation and she had no idea how she would get out of it. If only she could remember her name. She remembered almost everything about herself, about her biology, about her species – even though it was hard to believe she could be a part of a species she felt so different from – but her name still hadn’t come back to her mind and whoever was holding her as a prisoner hadn’t condescended to show themselves to her or even to talk to her. She could smell him around her, detect a telepathic signature, but it wasn’t enough to identify her enemy.

“You had me hanging on a hook for days, which wasn’t really nice or smart by the way. Now I’m pretty sore and really, really mad and ready to find out who you are and why you have kidnapped me.”

She studied her surroundings. The place looked exactly the same as it did when her feet were dangling 6 feet above the ground. It was dark and sinister. Desert. Large. She had an enhanced sight but couldn’t see the end of it. The only naked old lightbulb was too high to really light anything around it. Its projection on the ground around her didn’t reach a diameter longer than three feet or less. The walls could be a few steps away or unreachable. The ground was made of dirty cracked concrete. She wouldn’t go far with so little information. She needed to know more, needed a deeper knowledge of the place she was locked in. At least, she was free of her moves now. She could run head first in the dark to find a way out. Or call for help. She had friends from what she recalled. They must be looking for her. They must be worried.

She closed her eyes and focused on her other senses. She took a deep breath and released it immediately with a cough of pain. She wrapped an arm around her chest as if it could protect it from the burning pain in her muscles. An elephant seemed to be sat on her chest and making it nearly impossible for her to catch her breath. She fell to her knees, breathing heavily and black dots filling her sight. Yet, she didn’t abandon her reconnaissance mission. The air was cold, smelled like dust, rust and mould. Thin walls of corrugated iron. No sound from the outside. They were in an isolated area. No need to cry for help. No one would hear. No one would come. Dread filled her heart at the thought and she nearly fainted. She needed to remain calm. She needed to regulate the oxygen distribution in her body, reduce her blood pressure, be the less active possible.

“Is this funny to you? Kidnapping seemingly vulnerable women, locking them away and playing with their nerves? What kind of a game is that?”

She couldn’t help but speak and waste her precious oxygen faster. That was how she was. She was always talking. She could talk herself out of any situation. But this wouldn’t help in this very situation and she was aware of it. Yet, she was trying still.

She placed a hand on the ground for more support. Her body wasn’t okay with the way she was treating it today. She needed her second heart to stop acting dead and restart. The eco mode wasn’t made for her. She had to be on full working mode all the time. She punched her chest, where her second heart was located, but instead of setting it back to life, she caused herself another stab of pain that brought tears to her eyes. She did another attempt, choked and collapsed on a heap on the ground. That’s when she saw it, the yellow arrow on the ground, just in front of her this whole time, the dark grey letters screaming ‘WAY OUT’ in her face. She smirked, tried to get up. One of her legs obeyed, the second gave in and she fell, her head hitting the concrete hard and knocking her out once again. What an idiot she was.

Her head was pounding furiously. The crude light of this room was burning her eyes and increasing this pain that wasn’t leaving her anymore. She raised a hand to protect them from the light and noticed that her coat was gone. So were her socks and shoes. She felt naked just wearing her blue pants with her long-sleeved white shirt and short-sleeved blue rainbow shirt. Another manner to make her feel vulnerable. As a man, it wouldn’t have rattled her. But she was a woman now, and as such she felt like she had been violated. Someone had **_touched_** her while she was out. They had **_undressed_** her and who knew what else they had done. Carried her to another room that was much smaller but also full of light. An unbearable light for her head and her eyes. She had to do with it though.

She gathered her limbs together in an attempt to get up. Her heart was working harder to compensate the absence of her second heart. It was being a real problem. She wouldn’t hold on for a long time like this. Her system would shut down to preserve her from her strenuous lifestyle and enter in a recovery mode. Which would be everything but helpful in this situation.

“What do you want from me?” she groaned.

There obviously was someone with her in this huge building. Someone who was playing with her. She was like a rat in a maze created by some human scientist to test their reactions. She was far from appreciating this idea.

She looked up to find a switch for this crude light killing her slowly. Instead, she was facing a wall of screens. Security room. Why would she be placed there? Forgetting the light, she focused on the screen. All the rooms of this place were on this wall, even the room she was in. She raised a hand to her neck. Someone had fastened a black nylon collar around her neck. Not just some dog collar. One with a small black casing. A captor and a receptor. So they were taking their precautions for her not to run away.

Her fingers brushed over the cut on her forehead, over the ear piece she was now wearing. Rudimentary. There existed much better technology anywhere in the universe now. It reminded her of those ear pieces humans were wearing in an alternative universe… an ear piece that had transformed them into Cybermen. She swallowed heavily, forced herself not to panic. It wasn’t the _modus operandi_ of Cybermen. It was someone else. A small action camera of the latest fashion on Earth in 2020 was strapped to her chest with an appropriate harness. She was gonna be a puppet. A rat in the maze.

Four screens went off for a couple minutes. It wasn’t a good sign. She felt her heart drop in her chest when the images came back. The formerly empty room was now counting two familiar faces. Her friends had been abducted too. Friends she hadn’t seen in ages. Shackled, blindfolded and bodies sweating with fear, they were waiting for their fates to be decided. A fate now in the hands of the Time Lord behind the screens.

_“The game is starting now,”_ whispered a transformed voice in her ear. _“I’m leaving you five minutes to pick who dies. If you don’t give me an answer in the given time, both of them will die by your hand.”_


	3. My way or the highway

She was trying not to rush in the narrow concrete corridor. Her heart wouldn’t handle it if she was adding more adrenaline in her overwhelmed body. It wasn’t the right moment to have a heart attack or anything in the same lines. Her friends were counting on her. They needed her. She had been given five minutes to save a life and end another. It wasn’t some random human who had kidnapped her: it was someone who knew her and the persons she had met and travelled with. It was someone who could time travel and intervene in her timeline to pick persons from her past and maybe from her future. It was also someone who knew that she would do everything in her power to save them even if it meant sacrificing herself for this. The panic in her heart – which was beating at a surprisingly regular pace – and her cold reason had her convinced that there would be death today. She would cause death with her choices. Again.

There were cameras covering every angle. So she had access to images, but only to the ones she was supposed to see. Somewhere in the building, someone was watching her running against time to save her friends as if it was a bad action movie, and she was doing it live with the camera on her chest. Without her sonic, she hadn’t been able to hack it. Nor had she had the time to. A door had clicked open on her left and she hadn’t hesitated in sneaking out of the screen room to find her friends. There seemed to have no way out from this corridor. It was taking turns and turns but it always was the same and she felt like she was going round in circles. It was confirmed to her when her steps led her back to the screen room. A large countdown had been added on the screens displaying her the images of her friends. She didn’t have much time left.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath in. She would be unable to do anything if she was giving in to the panic inside her. She remembered the corridors she had walked through. She remembered every detail of them and now she could see the hidden mechanisms. The doors were hidden, and she knew exactly where to find the one she was looking for. She went straight for it. It wasn’t even unlocked. She burst inside the room. Made it toward her friends. All of her friends had learnt the hard way that she could never guarantee their safety and had become warriors, defenders of the planet they were living on. Despite the fear, they were both pulling on their chains to get free. They couldn’t see her but they had heard her. They were on alert, but hope filled their eyes when they realised it was her. They had been told she was a woman, had been shown her picture.

“What have they done to you?”

A hand reached for her face but she moved away. She wouldn’t let anyone touch her. They weren’t there for that. They had no time for that.

“We need to move quickly and find out who’s behind all of this. We don’t have much time.”

“Are you alright?”

No. She wasn’t. she wasn’t at all. Her sight was getting blurry and she was hoping it was a body dysfunction from being under oxygenated rather than actual tears revealing her state of mind. The chains she was pulling on weren’t moving an inch. They had been made to resist anything and each second was bringing one of them to a certain death.

“We are in a maze and someone is testing me. They are listening and watching us right now through the cameras covering every inch of this building and the one I am wearing. This is a game to them, but it’s dangerous. We are all targets.”

Them more than herself. They would run this stupid test until there was no one left to kill or until she gave in and gave them whatever they wanted in exchange for their lives and freedom. They needed her alive for their plan to work.

She ceased her pulling on the chains. The solution was there. If something happened to her, the game was stopping here. It wouldn’t guarantee the safety of her friends but she could still make a deal. She sighed, prepared herself for what she was about to do and olive eyes finally met grey ones.

“Break my neck,” she mouthed.

Surprise danced in the grey eyes but the man quickly understood what she was trying to do. She wanted to have the upper hand on the situation and she was willing to take off the reason why they were all here: herself. She was trying to drag them out of the hole they were hiding into. He had been a soldier, had witnessed many wars, had learnt many torture methods. He was the only one who could do that.

The other hostage was silently watching them. She didn’t know her that much in the end. She hadn’t been given the time to. However, she could feel that this small blonde woman would do everything in her power to protect them, to save them if it was possible.

The soldier swallowed and raised his hands. He had done that many times in the past but never to a friend. That friend in particular meant so much to him that it was harder to convince his reason that it was for the best. He was stopped before completing his move, before he could even touch his friend to make sure she was real and not some random hallucinations like he sometimes had. Two Cybermen burst through the door and manhandled her away from her friends. Her struggling was totally inefficient on them and she had to watch with horror as two other Cybermen forced her friends to their knees and held them at gunpoint. She herself could feel the cold metal of a Cyber fist in her ribs: they were holding her at bay with a blaster too. As if it was preventing her from fighting them.

_“Did you really think it was gonna work?”_ sang the distorted voice in her ear. _“We’ve barely begun the game and you already want to end it to it. You gotta play by the rules.”_

“I don’t care what your game and your rules are!” she yelled, out of breath. “My friends and I are gonna leave this place and kick your ass out of this planet.”

_“So much rage in such a little woman. You are amusing me. But the time is up and you haven’t chosen which one of your friends you wanted to sacrifice.”_

A wave of icy panic rushed through her blood and through her overwhelmed heart that was tiring with each passing minute she was forcing on it. What was gonna occur in the next few minutes would break it in more ways than one. It was a deep feeling inside her. This game would end in the worst of ways.

“You seem to know me well enough to know that I’ll never choose their lives to save mine.”

_“Eeny meeny, miny, toe.”_

“Aren’t we too old for this game?” she snarled.

 _“Catch a tiger by the toe._ ”

“Very funny. Leave them alone.”

She was making a show of bravado to hide her fear and despair in front of her friends, was struggling harder against the Cybermen holding her but they only tightened their hold until blood wasn’t circulating anymore in her arms.

_“If he hollers, let him go.”_

They were getting closer to the end of the counting rhyme. If she didn’t choose, they would do it for her. They would pick one of her friends, kill them in front of her and take the other away. Or they would kill both just for her to retain the lesson and play by the rules.

_“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.”_

“Jack!” she cried, desperate. “I’m sacrificing Jack!”

She closed her eyes not to see the pain in the eyes of her friend. It was the right choice to make. Jack was an immortal. He would come back to life shortly after being shot. They weren’t many to know about this. It had happened a long time ago. A fixed point in time. An act of love and care from a human who sacrificed everything for her.

_“Too late. You’ve lost your right to choose.”_

She was certain that her heart ceased beating the moment she heard those words, the moment she heard the blaster charge up and releasing its deadly shot in the body of Grace O’Brien, an innocent woman who already died once because of her, because she cared too much about others. This couldn’t be happening again. This could only be a nightmare. She refused to believe any of this could be true…


	4. Running out of time

Yaz was sat crossed legged on the ground of the screen room she was locked in. Just like the Doctor she had been isolated and equipped to run through the maze and be confronted to trials. It had only be small, acceptable trials. Almost challenges. Things too easy for a human who had travelled with the Doctor and been taught a few tricks. A sort of escape game with much more serious consequences if they failed. She wondered if the others had also been kidnapped. If they hadn’t, did they know she was missing? Were they looking for her? If they had, what had happened to them? Was her family safe? Her latest memory was being at home with her sister Sonia. Then, she woke up in this very room bare feet and without a jacket, and equipped like she was a participant in a television game that liked seeing things the candidate’s point of view.

However, her instincts, both the police officer one and the traveller one, were telling her that the next steps of this game wouldn’t be as easy as they had been so far. There was something evil about this whole place, something that was setting her on edge and giving her the strong envy of running away as far as she could. She couldn’t run away. She was trapped here, in this room. Even if she could have run, she wouldn’t have done it. She would have gone and seen if there were other persons like her trapped on this building. There must be other people. If she was the only contestant of this sick game, she wouldn’t be locked in here for hours before being given new orders to follow. These moments of peace she was getting (and using for imagining a plan to get out of here) were certainly because someone else was ‘playing’.

Her guesses were confirmed when six of the screens went black for a couple minutes before new images were displayed. One of the screens showed the Doctor in the same situation and equipment as her. She furrowed her brow when she saw the condition of the woman. She looked rough, exhausted. There was a large bruise on her forehead that was surrounding a nasty cut. She didn’t look fine at all. She seemed like she was breathing heavily and slightly limping. Could she see her? Or were the screens showing this room off for now? Yaz swallowed. If the Doctor was here too, there were better chances of them getting out of here before any damage was done to them. Yet, she was anxious. She never saw the Doctor looking so bad before. Not even after the events on Gallifrey. Not even after she disappeared for months.

The sound was on now and Yaz could hear her friend’s heavy breathing in her ear as she walked through the corridor like a rat in a maze. She forced herself to glance at the other screens and her heart sank in her chest. Two of them were showing the Doctor’s progression in the corridors; two others were filming another room where the Captain Jack Harkness and Grace were shackled. How was it possible? Grace had died many years ago now… how could she possibly be there, in that room? Were they facing a time traveller? Was it the Master again? No. She destroyed him. She destroyed him, his army of monsters and her home planet. She destroyed everything she had left before being sent to jail. How she had gotten out of that cell was a mystery, but if you could escape a life sentence of imprisonment, you could get out of this insane game.

Things would certainly change if there was an after. This adventure could cost them all their lives – you just had to see the Doctor to understand how serious the situation was; Yaz had always thought this woman was indestructible since she was always putting on the brave face but even the brave face couldn’t hide her pain and terror, the sound of her heavy breathing, the desperate hope she was feeding herself and her friends with – and if the Doctor was out, who would save them all? Wasn’t it their roles to them, her companions? Wouldn’t she be proud if they were the ones saving her once again? If they hadn’t been there for Gallifrey, would she have made it? If Jack hadn’t broken her out of jail, would they ever have seen her again? She must be regretting the safety of her prison cell right now.

“Doctor, no!”

The Time Lady hadn’t heard her obviously, and Yaz was relieved to see the gamemasters reacting and sending their security robots – Yaz always shivered when she saw Cybermen for it reminded her of awful past adventures – that could only be programmed to obey someone else instead of upgrading everyone they met to manhandle her away from the prisoners. This wasn’t gonna help any of them with their fear of these terrible creatures. But what Yaz was gonna retain of this sick trial wasn’t the Cybermen brutality, the Doctor choosing to sacrifice Jack and the blaster killing Grace once again… No, what she was gonna retain was the cry of agony that followed. The Doctor. It was the last thing she heard before the screens went black and ear piece became silent again as the Doctor was dragged out of the room, kicking and fighting with all she had.

Yaz was left alone with herself to think about what had just happened in front of her eyes. This could be manipulation. Anyone could modify video files nowadays. It would be easy for them to create this scene so she would believe that Grace was alive – which she wasn’t, Yaz remembered all too well the dull day they had lost her – and dead again, that the Doctor wasn’t okay and losing her mind slowly. But this could also be the truth. Someone could have travelled in the Doctor’s timeline and messed around. Shouldn’t they feel it when their past was changed? She had known Grace, and her memories of her were unchanged. She remembered the train in Sheffield, Tim Shaw, Grace dying, the funerals. This couldn’t have been Grace in this room, but why had the Doctor believed it? Why had she chosen to sacrifice Jack for someone who wasn’t Grace?

Yaz sat there with a racing heart, and tears flowing down her cheeks. She was unable to move, unable to think of something else but of a rough Doctor looking lost, of Grace dying once again, of that cry of agony that would never leave her memory. She never heard anything like this before and just the memory of it had her heart breaking and hurting. It would forever haunt her mind. How had they managed to break the Doctor’s shell and turn her into this pathetic version of her? Or had it been her from the start? Was it what she was like when she was alone? Was she only strong and brave when she had an audience? Was she only putting on an act? How could no one have seen this before? They all had been blinded by the clever, reckless, alien coming out of the blue and showing them wonders who had herself admitted that they didn’t know her. What a shame.

She suddenly was filled with rage. Rage against the Doctor for pretending to be someone she was. Rage against herself for falling in the arms of a smooth-talker, for hoping that her insignificant life had been turned upside down for the better. Oh, turned upside down it had been but look where it had led her: straight in the lion’s den with the person she trusted and **_loved_** being an imposter. Yes, she did have feelings for the Doctor and she was disgusted to have fallen for the wrong person. Her whole life was a slap in her face, each failure hitting harder than the previous one. She had really thought that this time was different, that she had found a reason to keep fighting, that she had found someone for her… how gullible had she been on that last part. As if someone like the Doctor could get interested in someone like her. But this time, she was getting out of this failure stronger than she had ever been.

She raised her head and observed the screens through blurry eyes. Tears of rage, tears of pain. The screens were all off. A collection of black rectangles on a wall made of concrete. A creepy version of the already creepy show _Black Mirror_. What was being imagined for them now? Yaz only had herself to get out of here. She couldn’t count on the Doctor anymore to save her. She couldn’t count on anyone else but herself. It was a lesson she should have retained a long time ago when she was left alone to face what had seemed like the end of the world at the time. It could only get better once you’ve reached the bottom… except the ground could still give out under your feet and make fall in a deeper and darker abyss. She was experiencing it right now, and she was far from having seen it all.

Most of the screens came to life at the same time displaying confused and scared but brave faces. Yaz recognised Jack and Ryan among them. They seemed to be fine. Trapped, caged like animals but fine. Jack was the only one to wear that mask of rage on his face like she did. He had seen the Doctor in person and she had chosen to kill him. Yaz would have been mad at her too for doing this… It had an impossible choice to make, and they soon would be confronted to another.

_“Contestants_ ,” purred a voice in her ear piece. One of the gamemasters was addressing them all. “ _One of you has seen their time in the game considerably reduced due to a mistake they committed. They tried to run away, to quit the game before its end and caused damages to our complex.”_

Another screen switched on and displayed the steaming ruins of a collapsed building. The damages were important, but not enough to stop the deadly game, not enough for anyone here to have felt the building collapsing. Yaz dared hoping again. She had been wrong. The Doctor was out there causing damages to get the hell out of this place.

_“Of course this couldn’t be left unpunished for the culprit. BUT. We are giving them one last chance to come back in the game. You are that chance. You just needed to find them and free them before the Grim Reaper does.”_

The two last screens came to life. Yaz felt all colours fade from her face and her heart sunk in her chest. The Doctor indeed had been the one who caused damages but she had been caught. Her face, arms and legs were covered his bruises, cuts and dirt. Her clothes were torn. The cameras were giving them two angles on the Doctor’s situation. One was above her head and filming a close-up of her face, the other was above her shoulder and filming her surroundings, which she had already taken in consideration according to her reaction. She was kicking and punching and scratching at the box’s walls to try and create a breach that would help her to save herself. She was reacting irrationally but Yaz doubted anyone would react rationally upon being buried alive to distract some twisted minds.

The screens went off. Only the two screens showing the Doctor in her transparent coffin stayed on. A countdown appeared down those screens. Three hours. They had three hours to find and save the Doctor. There was no time to waste…


	5. Where do you think you're going?

Even with one heart and a half-oxygenated body, she was cleverer than these upgraded humans that didn’t have anything humans anymore. It took her not even half a second to figure out a way to outsmart them and run for her life. Robots could do lots of things, but AI weren’t smart enough in this century to work against a Time Lady’s mind. She remembered playing chess with the Cyber-Planner once. It had been an interesting game. She had won of course; she hadn’t had any other choice if she wanted to save all of her new friends. This was no different from this one time. At least, they weren’t CyberMasters, all exterminated with Gallifrey and the Master, but a Cyberman was dangerous still and she had to play her cards well if she wanted her dubious plan to work. A plan made of a limited series of possibilities in her situation.

She fought the men of steel with all the strength she had, forced them to readjust their hold on her arms and the moment she felt it loosening she threw herself on the ground, kicked one of the Cybermen behind the knees (her shin would forever hate her for that move) and pushed the arm of the other toward his fallen companion so the discharge of blaster that was meant for her went to them instead. The explosion stunned her, left her with a temporarily damaged sight and hearing. She used the smoke to her advantage and got rid of this ridiculous collar and camera. She picked up the dead Cyberman’s blaster part and ran straight in front of her. The other one was running after her and it wouldn’t be long before it caught her with her worsening limping (her right leg was numb). The plan had worked for once. Now, she had to improvise.

She was on the run in a complex she didn’t know with a Cyberman running after her (if you could call this running) and didn’t have many options as to how she could escape this hell. She crashed against the first door she met, a door that thankfully gave in to the pressure, and she stumbled into the room, fell on all four and scrambled to her feet again. She found a staircase, took the stairs two by two. They were underground. She had to reach the surface. She wouldn’t be able to run for much longer. She had to get rid of the Cyberman. That would buy her some time. She entered another room. It was full of shelving units that were weighed down under tons of useless objects that had been thrown here and forgotten right after. She gathered a few things that could be useful to her, fiddled with the Cyber blaster. Faster, she had to be faster.

The sounds of her heart and heavy breathing were loud in her ears and made her paranoid about them being heard by anyone out there. That could give her away and ruin her improvisation. The steps of the Cyberman were closer. It would be there soon. She was ready now. The door burst open. She didn’t hesitate and threw her improvised weapon at the threat. Its instability made it blow up immediately. The explosion was louder and more powerful than she had expected it to be. It blew away the Cyberman and took away half of the room and the corridor behind as well as the ceilings with it. She used the shelves as a ladder to go up. A wall collapsed above her head and flooded the place with natural light. Her way out was here. She went straight for it before the chance could be taken away from her.

They were on Earth. That was a certainty now that she was above the surface. The year was yet to be determined but she had a feeling that they hadn’t moved in time. So, Earth, 2020. Bad year. It was gonna be complicated to get help to free her friends. If only she could find her TARDIS! Her ship must be where she had left her last time. Down Yaz’s block of flats. How far were they from this spot? Were they even in Sheffield? The surroundings were unknown to her. England for sure, but not Sheffield or any of the big cities. They had been taken in the far North, where it was all desert. No, not easy to hide such an underground complex in the middle of nowhere… except it was a former bunker. You usually found these in France. But there were some in England, one of the most known being the Battle of Britain bunker located in the Middlesex. The air didn’t smell like Middlesex though.

The ground didn’t taste like Middlesex either as she could observe when her right leg gave in and sent her rolling in the dust and ruins of the place. The fall was hard on her; she couldn’t get up. Her ears were ringing and she was blinded by the light of the unusual sun of October. Before she could recover from this nasty fall, she was surrounded by a dozen Cybermen she hadn’t heard coming. She couldn’t hear much of anything anyway. She didn’t even feel it when she was picked up and taken away from her only chance of running away from here. She had failed, and she didn’t think that she would have the strength or motivation to try again after that. This had required so much energy that it would take her some time to gather enough to try anything again. If she ever was giving a chance to.

The tip of a goad was dug deep in her ribs before a discharge overwhelmed her brain and nervous system to the point of paralysing her and causing her brain to temporarily shut down to fix the mess this overload of energy had caused. This couldn’t be a Cyberman holding the other end of such a torture instrument. It would affect them too if they were. There was another being that wasn’t an electricity conductor. One of the gamemasters? The one always murmuring in her ear to give her orders? If he said anything this time, she didn’t hear it. She was even too stunned to realise what was going on as she was carried back in the complex. Not inside, but on the surface of this underground construction. There were more buildings around. Half destroyed buildings, and abandoned lands left to nature.

When she came back to her senses, she noticed immediately that something was wrong. She wasn’t back in the video room, nor was she in a cell or any kind of room that looked like a jail. She was lying on her back and her body was stiff and painful from the discharge it had taken earlier. Where had they taken her? Everything was dark around her. She tried to sit up but bumped her head against something. She groaned and palpated the zone above her head. Her fingers met Plexiglass. She palpated around more, using both her hands and feet, and focused on the little she could see of her surroundings. She was in a box, large and long enough to contain a body taller and fatter than hers. There was a ventilation system but it didn’t ease the revelation that impose itself on her mind: she had been buried alive, and even if she could get out of this box, who knew how deep it was buried?

A wave of panic washed over her. Irrationality kicked in. She began kicking, punching and scratching the sides of the box as if it could change anything to her situation. It could worsen it actually. The reasonable decision would be to keep calm, save her oxygen and think about a way to save herself from another life or death situation she was finding herself in unwillingly. Usually, she was looking for troubles… Today, she couldn’t remember who she could have pissed off so badly they had decided she deserved to be a forced contestant into a deadly game in which the punishment for quitting was to be buried alive. She couldn’t even remember her own name, how could she expect to remember the names of the many people she must have annoyed in her long life? In the many lives she had had?

She eventually calmed. Her agitation was useless. It would lead her nowhere. Staying in that box wouldn’t either. It only left her with plenty of time to think about a way out… and what would happen if she couldn’t save herself. It wasn’t that bad, right? She was an immortal. She would just die and regenerate endlessly in this box until she was found. Well, if the regeneration didn’t shatter it and drown her in earth. That would another awful way to die. This one was already terrible. She wouldn’t wish it to her worst enemy… Who was it already? What was their name? She could the face of a man. No, a woman. Another man. And another. And another. It was quite confusing. Wait, she was suffering from silent hypoxia. Her brain was searching for oxygen. Her whole body was looking for oxygen. Yet, she had breathed it all in the time she had spent in there.

She was wheezing now, and her hearts… yeah, both of her hearts were working again. The discharge had forced the second one back to work, but if this could have been good news when she wasn’t buried alive, it wasn’t when she was in fact locked in that box with organs and muscles screaming for oxygen her hearts couldn’t deliver anymore. The skin of her fingers had turned to a confusing purple blueish colour. Blonde strands of hair were stuck to her face with sweat. It definitely was hypoxia and it wasn’t silent anymore.

She was suffocating. Every time she was breathing in, it felt like fire was flowing down her chest and breathing out wasn’t giving her any relief. Black dots were dancing before her eyes, clouding her sight and common sense. She brought her mouth close to the ventilation system in hope to get some oxygen but there was nothing. Nothing but carbon dioxide already poisoning her. She imagined how awful it must have been for Jack when he had been buried alive – a misfortune she had heard of – in the bare earth without a box to protect him from the dirt getting in his respiratory system. It had been a death far worse than the one awaiting her. It was probably the dumbest of all of her deaths… that she could remember. How much of her life had been taken away from her? Manipulating a child… using them as a science experiment… who could be so cruel to do such a thing…

She was losing it. Her lids were so heavy and all of her was begging for oxygen she couldn’t find. It was time to give up, to stop struggling, to let go of this new life she had learnt to appreciate. Becoming the woman she was had been a renewal. A new chapter in her long life. It wasn’t easy to let go. She liked this appearance of hers, this new personality, and she didn’t want to go. She had to; she couldn’t hold on anymore. She thought she saw some light above her, thought that someone might have come to her rescue. She imagined some dark hair, and dark eyes. Soft raspy voice. Nothing more. Nothing anymore.


	6. Please

The tender skin behind her ear was hurting. The oxygen her organism was supplied with was pure. Purer than it should in an earthy atmosphere. She could hear herself breathe pretty loudly and the oxygen rushing through her lungs was liquid fire spreading life back into her limp body. A fresh puff of air bringing her back to a life she was convinced to have let go of. She was breathing again, and pure oxygen was accessible, running through her nostrils and mouth, down her trachea and filling her lungs like an illicit substance that would make her high. She was high, high on oxygen, and she could laugh to be alive still in that very body of hers. She hadn’t been far from losing this life and going through another change. But who had pulled her out of her hole? A friend or a foe? She remembered a dark silhouette…

She suddenly opened her eyes to make sure she wasn’t in the box anymore. Doubts were allowed when you were in the hands of the enemy who had left you to die over and over again for breaking rules she hadn’t even been taught. She could see nothing, nothing but a blinding white light. For a millisecond, she thought she had reached what humans called the end of the tunnel, the end of her life, the entrance of Paradise. Then, she snorted at her own idiocy and was rewarded with the stab of deep pain. It was still located on the tender skin behind her ear. The rest of her body didn’t exist. She had to bring it back to life and figure out what was this pain she was suffering wrong. She could deal with pain. She did it excellently on a daily basis, but it had to be a pain with an explanation. For herself. Other people didn’t need to know.

She raised an arm to protect her eyes from the light but could barely move it that her skin met the cold and rough metal of a ring in which her wrist was caught. Wrists actually. As well as ankles, waist and neck. No chance of escaping from whatever fate reserved to her. She would make a wild guess to say that it involved the area behind her left ear where the pain was throbbing intensively. She closed her eyes, focused on her other senses. She had been taken out of her box before dying – she would feel the work of her cells coming together and forming a new being of that was the case, and she still felt very herself - but she must have been rescued by some twisted mind who needed her for some dubious experiences on a rare species that didn’t exist anymore in this universe. The first and the past of the Time Lords of Gallifrey.

The thought triggered the memories of her last visit on Gallifrey and the way it ended with heavy secrets and consequences. She had lost her home twice. And she was the one to blame every time. She remembered the long walk under the burning sun, in the reddish sand sneaking in her heavy leather boots. Heavy boots but not as heavy as the weight of the fabric bundle in which she had wrapped the Moment. No more had she repeated. No more war. No more screams. No more pain. No more dead. Only the weight of a crushing guilt and solitude. She was the last of the Time Lords for the first time. And then, hope. Coming back home the long way round. The weight of guilt and loneliness gone. Having a home to go back to if she wanted to. Until Gallifrey and the Time Lords were exterminated again by the hand of one of theirs.

Someone was rummaging through her mind in the most indelicate and indiscreet way. It was particularly unpleasant to have someone entering your private sphere and not even trying to hide it. They thought she was out physically and so wouldn’t mind them having a look inside her mind. But she did really care about it. She hadn’t built her strong defences and broken the Matrix to be a victim of mental abuse so easily. She was gonna push them away, overwhelm their mind. She had dozens of lives of memories if they wanted. They were resisting, but it was fine. It was only strengthening her will to kick them out. It gave her a goal, something to do instead of staying still like they wanted her to. They seemed to know a lot about her but it wasn’t enough. They should have known better than to kidnap her and her friends. The Oncoming Storm was coming for them.

“No more!” she barked at them.

There was a cry of surprise from her attacker as she kicked them out of her mind full burst. She heard them stumble and hit what sounded like a metallic trolley on which were metallic tools according to the ruckus they made in their fall. They either were in a workshop or in an operating room. Or both. Some butchers were working in the worst places ever. With the pain she felt, the operating room felt like the right option, and it made her uneasy. A new batch of undesired memories filled her mind. Memories of a young girl in a lab. She refused to think about this in this hostile environment where people could read her mind. She refused to reveal to them a secret she herself hadn’t completely figured out. A secret that had her whole life shattered. A secret she had paid the price of by losing everything she had thought was her home, her people.

She used the connection she had established with her attacker to control his mind temporarily. If there were other persons in this room, she was screwed, but she couldn’t let go of this new chance. She manipulated them into releasing her from her restraints. It was quick. Just a turn of the key on a machine and all the rings around her body clicked open. She sat up, eyes wide open, and scanned her surroundings. The theory of the operating room was the right one. The certitude that her attacker wasn’t alone too. Five men and women were surrounding her rough bunk bed she was sat on. All were ready to intervene if she made a move. But she didn’t have to move when she had someone under control. It wouldn’t last long.

“Whatever you’ve implanted behind my ear, you’re gonna get it out right now. This game has last too long already.”

She prudently swung put her feet to the ground. It was cold and she couldn’t suppress a shiver upon feeling it crawling up her wounded legs. No one made a move as she tested her capacity to stand. Her fingers brushed over the painful zone and met an apparatus similar to a cochlear implant. Colours fade from her face as they realised what they were doing to her.

“Get it out,” she ordered. “NOW!”

They didn’t obey. They remained still. It was suspicious. They were waiting for something, something they weren’t letting her know about. As if they had all been programmed to react like this. There was a barely noticeable smirk on their faces. Her hearts were beating fast now. The left side of her face felt stretched out, as if she had gone through a partial facelift. She observed them all. They were wearing an ear implant. All of them. It meant something. Her brain was just missing it out. What was it? Why were they so satisfied with her reaction? It was wrong. All of this was wrong. All these persons… they had a vacant look. No real sign of life, of personality. Like an empty shell set to become perfect soldiers. This explained the presence of Cybermen in every corner. These were humans partially converted.

The thought hit her hard. She raised a trembling hand to the left side of her face. They hadn’t just implanted her something. They modified her. It was far worse than what she could have ever imagined. She could be converted like any human. The Master had proved this in the past. She swallowed when her fingers met a printed circuit going from her temple to her chin. She was the upgraded version of these people. She just hadn’t been activated yet.

“No,” she mumbled incredulously. “No, please. Let this be a bad dream.”

She refused to be one of them, refused to be given orders, refused to upgrade and kill other people without a second thought. The next words from a woman who seemed to be the head of this team turned her blood to ice: ‘Contestant 13 has successfully been upgraded’.. Not only had they made her a contestant in this sick game, but they also had turned her into a weapon. Who knew what they were up to now? She had to find a way to free herself before she was forced to commit an irredeemable act…


	7. I've got you

She never got out of this room on her own. Shortly after the vil realisation that had hit her like a truck earlier, she couldn’t remember much. Only a few words. One word actually. ‘Activated’. And then, nothing but a black hole in her memory until she collapsed in a room of the prison she swore she never had been in before. She had been thrown in that cell so abruptly, without an explanation, without a call, and had been processed only hours later after she began carving tally marks on tbe walls with her bare hands to count the passing time. And activity she had been forced to change into a red jumpsuit and compelled to a mugshot where she briefly had had some interactions with other alien beings. Briefly since she was the only one to do the conversation to get some clues on where she was. It usually wasn’t bothering to chat with herself.

The familiar double heartbeats racing against her ear was comforting to her. The rough fabric of a wool coat itched her face, yet she was clinging to it like a lifeline sent to her in times of distress. She **_was_** in times of distress. All her senses were overwhelmed by familiarity: the two hearts drumming in the chest her face was pressed into, the soft fabric of a waistcoat with the rough one of a coat in her clenched fists, the strong perfume of space, time and crimes, the taste of fingers that had stroked her face and lingered on her lips. Her oldest friend was holding her tight in his arms. Her reason was trying to tell her that it was impossible. Her hearts were arguing with her reason for she needed that comforting thought of having a friend who understood her better than anyone else in the world. The only one who could see her true self.

She shouldn’t be so trusty toward him. He had done the worst dirty tricks to her in the past; he stroked many lives, destroyed towns and planets and civilisations he; constantly reminded her that she wasn’t this happy free bubble of energy, that there was a dark side about her that couldn’t be forgotten in a corner as much as she desired to forget about it. Her companions, her friends, had always been the best of her but him… him was keeping her balanced between the good and bad, he was the reason why she never being the change she wanted to see in the worlds even when it was the hardest of things to do. If she wasn’t, who would be? Who was old enough to have seen enough of the universes to fix what needed to be fixed, to help those who needed to be helped? Who was brave enough for this never-ending mission?

They had made a promise when they were young, the promise to travel together, to see the stars together. They were the pariahs, the outcasts with impossible dreams far, far from Gallifrey’s pompous standings. They used to travel before. Before they turned her into an experiment. Before they found the secret of her immortality and took away her lives from her. Her own people, her family. All born from her genes, all erased from her memory to preserve the secret around their real origins. Infuriating. And they had stopped travelling to ‘watch over’ the universe and never intervene because they were better than them all. She had never accepted that and had run away on the same day she did. And their story ended on Gallifrey.

Her reason took over. The person carrying her couldn’t be who she thought it was. She pushed them away and jumped from their arms, putting as much distance between them as she could in this narrow corridor. She stumbled back, legs too instable to carry her just yet and they tried to catch her and bring her the support she needed but she stubbornly refused their help until her body forced her to by giving in a few steps away. The floor was her friend now with how many times they had encountered each other in the last few days but it was cold and rough and she scratched her knees and hands in the fall. A couple more minor injuries to add to the list. How was she supposed to begin a recovery process if she was constantly getting hurt? When had she become so clumsy? When had her mobility become so chaotic?

Two hands caught her arms and pulled her up to her feet. She fought them and heard a pleasant groan when they hit the wall opposite hers with a loud hers with a loud curse in a language not even the TARDIS could translate. The wall behind her was her only support. She looked up. Three blurred silhouettes were facing her. Three identical silhouettes with dark hair and a purple outfit. They were no taller than her, and only one person was matching all these characteristics.

“You can’t be here. You’re dead.”

“I’m feeling better, thank you. Now, let me help you.”

“No, I’m good on my own.”

“You’re ridiculously stubborn.”

“You’re the last person I would go to for help. You’re not even really here.”

He could only be a ghost, a hallucination. Like Grace earlier. She swallowed, slipped down the wall to sit on the floor. Her distress, her bravery, her death… it had all seemed too real to her, but hallucinations were made to look **_real_**. She was confused. She could even trust her brain on that one. All of this was going too far.

“Someone’s messing with us. They saved me from death milliseconds before it happened and locked me down here in a cage until you and your precious companions were added to their collection. I should be mad at you, not mad at them. I have to get you out of here to make them regret the day they were even born.”

“And turn them into Cybermen?” she snapped.

He laughed and she resisted to the temptation to throw herself at him and strangle him. This manic, devilish laugh was haunting her nightmares as well as his revelations on her lives and the monstrousness he created with the bodies of their dead people. **_His_** dead people would be more accurate.

“We’re dead. You and I. You never pressed that button but you never made it to a TARDIS either.”

“It can’t be true. The Death Particle would have destroyed everything after being activated, and I’m very much alive.”

“Are you? How would you know?”

“I just… I would know, that’s all! I can make the difference between what’s real and what’s not. I **_am_** real and you are **_not_**.”

“Why are you arguing with me then?”

He smirked and fury grew inside her. Enough fury for her to throw herself at him and tried to strangle him. Which made him laugh even more. She was so predictable, and so oblivious of who she really was. An identity crisis would send her off the edge. This would be pleasant to witness.

“When was the last time you had a proper look at yourself?” he taunted her.

He was never pronouncing her name. She had the feeling that he usually was saying it a lot, and had chosen this moment not to say it at all. If he was a product of her mind, this would explain it since she couldn’t remember what was her own name. She remembered everything but that. How fucked was it?

She stopped for a moment and stared at him, confused. What did he mean? He pointed at her hands. She was still wearing her torn dirty clothes since the beginning. Past the rolled sleeve of her white shirt, lines and dots of a greenish blue were drawn on her skin. The exact same lines and dots she had on the human scientists earlier. The exact same lines and dots she was certain were on her face. How long had she been off? When had they managed to keep up with their work?

“They can manipulate you as long as they have the remote of your device. They tested it, you’re an excellent recruit to them. Easily manipulable when you put on the table the lives of your pets.”

She wanted to yell, to hit him with all her strengths, to ruin his handsome face and devilish smile but she suddenly felt beaten. She broke down, afraid of what she had become, afraid not to be able to get out of here and reverse the damages done to her, afraid not to save her friends’ lives.

“It’s okay, I’ve got you.”

This time, she didn’t protest, nor did she fight when he wrapped his arms around her and carried her away. Even if it was her brain messing up, even if he was her enemy, she couldn’t refuse the comfort and cares she was craving for at the moment. She would own up to her madness later, with a clearer mind, if she ever was given the chance to get a clearer mind…


	8. Where did everybody go?

She had no idea where he had taken her. He had promised her that she would be safe here, in this small place, a sort of studio flat that had been in use recently – probably him living there, hidden from everyone – where he said that all signals from the exterior were scrambled and so they wouldn’t be able to track her or command her against her will. She was safe, he repeated. Safe and taken care of. The Master had never been so soft, so gentle with her. Not in the lives she could remember. They had always made plans to cause troubles on Gallifrey, always had fought each other across the universe. If things had happened between them in the past, it was always rough and brutal, always quick and unsentimental. A friendship evolving in a burning hate as they went on separate ways, one to create chaos, the other to fix their mess.

She was safe, she kept repeating herself, as he was leading her to the tiny bathroom of this flat and took care of her cuts and bruises. He had tried undressing her for her to soak in a warm bath but she had virulently pushed him away, A move that had had him offended for he had seen her naked before and couldn’t see why she was refusing this benefit to him this time. This wasn’t her best body, he had to admit, but it wasn’t a bad one either. And he had no intention of touching her inappropriately. He just wanted to help her in the bathtub since her legs couldn’t carry her. He had insisted, grumbling about how annoying she could be when she had decided something, but she had pushed him away again and turned her back on him to hide herself from him and prevent him from touching her again.

“Come on, I’ve already seen you naked before!”

“Not like this!” she snarled.

Not with this female body she still had troubles to get used to after centuries of being a man. With a female body came female insecurities. She was no different from humans on this point. The idea of his male eyes on her female naked body was making her uncomfortable. Time Lords were gender fluids, they could switch genders with every regeneration and knew every inch and every limit of every gender.

“Do you want me to leave?” he sighed, exasperated by her behaviour.

It was very Master-like to react like this to such a ridiculous – in his opinion – reaction from his best frenemy. However, it was a reaction he could understand since he had been a woman in his precious incarnation and had been quite reluctant to let him see her at first. Well, it was also because he hadn’t recognised him immediately. Yet, Missy was his favourite incarnation so far. It had been so pleasant to be the devil in Prada, pleasant to have been able to travel with him and be ‘nice’ for once. Nice but boring. His regeneration had been a surprise (he was supposed to have reached his last life) but the blessed chance to restart on a better – in his opinion – life.

“No!”

It was a word suffused with fear and her big eyes were back on him, were begging him to stay. She didn’t want to be alone. She never ever wanted to be alone. Especially if she had to stay a prisoner of this bunker. If he were leaving, she would feel abandoned, left alone in a situation where she couldn’t control anything. She was the toy of fate, and needed someone to help her not to give up. He had never seen her like this before. Never had she been so close to give up. Not even when he had shattered her whole life with a heavy secret.

She had finally allowed him to take her clothes off and helped her into the bathtub filled with warm water and bubbles of soap. His hands were slow and gentle when he washed while she remained sat with her knees against her chest. His fingers unknotted her hair, longer and roots darker than the last time he had seen her. He dried her off with a towel, helped her in clean clothes that – surprisingly – fitted her, brushed her hair and carried her to bed where she curled up in a ball. She was making herself as small as she could. She was protecting herself against future attacks on her. The Doctor was vulnerable, and the Master was enjoying it and hating it all at once.

She shouldn’t fall asleep, but she was so tired. She couldn’t trust the Master, but he was her only friend here. She was supposed to ask the right questions instead of being so worryingly silent. She was supposed to ask him how he could have survived, how he could go around here unnoticed, how he had found her when she had been buried alive, what he was doing here. She did nothing, he said nothing. He just sat there and watched her struggling against her exhaustion, struggling to keep in control.

“These were the quarters of the soldiers during the war. Must have belonged to a high ranked one since there’s a bathroom. Rudimentary, but it does the work.”

The Doctor remained silent so he kept speaking. His voice was paradoxically having a strange soothing effect on her, and creating a deep anxiety that crawled under her skin and ticked her like a thousand ants swarming just under her epidermis. She was silent, too silent.

“Whoever these people are, they haven’t found this part of the bunker yet. Consider yourself in isolation. Protected from them until they find you. You were good at outsmarting people on Gallifrey. They were all so dumb. Being outsmarted, by you of all people.”

He snorted, and she was too far gone in the state between sleep and wakefulness to tell him to shut the hell up. She couldn’t sleep, but couldn’t stay awake either. She would have to do with this state. It should be good. It should do her some good. She was in isolation, with someone who could be considered as a friend after all the time they had spent together.

“Master,” she mumbled tiredly.

“Hm?”

“Don’t say goodbye. Please.”

She wouldn’t get back up if she was losing him. She wasn’t good at being alone. She never had. But at least, she could be thankful for the time off he had offered her. It would give her time to rest and have a clearer mind. And then, she would build a plan to get out of here and save everyone who was a prisoner in this hell…


	9. For the greater good

Ryan was frustrated. Right after this inhuman race against time to find the Doctor before she suffocated in her plexiglass coffin buried deep in the ground of this infernal and cold place (he had been deprived from his shoes and socks and from his favourite jacket), he had thrown back in this tiny cell where he could barely stand or stretch his arms. He only had an uncomfortable chair and a large screen where he had seen the terrible fate of his friends. Since he had seen the Doctor choosing Captain Jack’s life to save his nan. Despite the fact it couldn’t be real since his nan died years ago on the day they first met the Doctor, her death had hit him hard and sent him raging, yelling and kicking against the solid bars of his cage. It shouldn’t be this hard to lose someone who had been dead and gone for so long already.

He had raged against her unfair death, against the rules of this sick game, against the way they were manhandling his friend and then, raging against the gamemasters for having such a twisted mind and sending her friend to a certain death. He had rushed through the corridors, followed the arrows and clues given in his earpiece. He hadn’t found the Doctor. He ignored who did, but she had been found and taken out of her box. He could have said that they hadn’t had any news from her after that, but they did. Or he did. He had seen her shortly after. He could have thought that it was a copy of her. A robot devoid of emotions and connected to all the other robots wandering around the complex and making sure no one was trying to escape. The punishment inflicted to the Doctor had discouraged everyone from trying. Or that was what they were told.

And that was precisely why he thought that the blonde woman was his friend, because he was told it was her, and they wouldn’t have bothered to recreate all the bruises and cuts she had after disfiguring her with electronic components implanted under the pale skin of her face and left arm. She had faced him, her face turned into an emotionless mask, eyes empty and blind, body ready to kill. She wasn’t entirely converted, and this version was different from the robots he had met so far during their travels. A robot was a robot still and his friend, his so strong, so resistant, so impressive friend was manipulated by a bunch of assholes he definitely was gonna kick the asses of. Who were they to attack his family, to hurt them and think they could get away with no consequences? Never again. Years of travelling with the Doctor had taught him a couple things.

Back in his cell, he had attentively examined every corner and every object present around him and had fiddled with what he could find to build stuff that could be useful. The Doctor was against weapons, and he had learnt that there were other ways to neutralise an enemy than to use guns and violence, ways that were way more efficient than weapons. It had taken him more time than it would have taken the Doctor or a person without dyspraxia but he was proud of the couple tools he had put together. Hopefully it would work just fine when the time to use it would come. First of all, he had to break out of his cell. There were many ways to unlock a door, but the sonic screwdriver was the best way to do it. Where was it already? He remembered picking it up in front of the TARDIS before they were shown what happened to the Doctor.

He had his belt still. Good. He checked the secret compartment hidden in the buckle. It was an item he had bought on a market of some random future colony of humans they had visited one day with the Doctor. It looked small but the Time Lord had tinkered with it and managed somehow to make it bigger on the inside like her TARDIS. The thought of his friend with her furrowed brow, creased forehead and tongue out as she worked on this belt made him sad. He remembered how happy she was when she held out to him the improved belt, how bright her smile was when he thanked her, impressed by her knowledge and by her ability to do anything. She was like a magician and he was the amazed by her tricks. That would describe their relationship perfectly, and he wondered: was she okay?

Noisy footsteps coming his way interrupted his search for the Doctor’s precious tool. He put his shirt back over his belt just before two Cybermen showed up in front of him. He waved at them with a smile.

“Hey, guys. What’s up? How’s this game going for you? Placed any bet?”

“Ryan Sinclair, you have been chosen for the ritual sacrifice.”

“You will follow us without causing troubles.”

“What do you mean, ritual sacrifice?”

“You will be upgraded to serve the greater cause of the Cybermen.”

“No way.”

“Your opinion is unnecessary.”

“Your precious friends chose you to save their lives.”

The cold hand that had caught his heart upon the word ‘sacrifice’ was now squeezing it so hard blood had issues circulating through his body. It took him a couple minutes to regain enough calm to be lucid again, but these minutes served the Cybermen right since they pulled him out of his cage and restrained him and pushed him forward. They took him deeper in the guts of this insane complex until they reached a room full of converted workers, humans and Cybermen forming a line containing humans; converted workers on one side, a crowd of prisoners on the other. Among them, he saw Yaz and Graham. They looked rough and exhausted but they were okay. He looked around to see if he could spot the Doctor but no sign of a blonde head anywhere. Had they fully converted her? Was she in one of these armours of steel patiently waiting for orders? His stomach was turned upside down at the thought. He couldn’t imagine a world without the Doctor.

It was his turn to save her this time. He could do it, right? She had saved them so many times, it was only fair to return the favour. First, he had to free himself. It wouldn’t be easy. The ritual sacrifice seemed to be nothing more but a total conversion into a Cyberman. He wasn’t gonna accept that. He wasn’t gonna let them turn him into an emotionless robot and use him against his friends or other innocent persons. For once he was thankful to have grown up in a world where everything was fucked up. And the internet generation had stuffed him with useless information completed by the Doctor’s knowledge and their life or death adventures. They were taking off the manacles to place him in the conversion machine and he was gonna try something when a too familiar voice spoke through the hushed murmurs filling the room.

“You ain’t sacrificing my grandson for any stupid reason!”

“You will shut up or you will be deleted.”

“Delete me all you want, I won’t let you have him!”

“He will serve the cause.”

“Take me instead!”

Graham was volunteering to take Ryan’s place and the young man shouldn’t have been as surprised as he was upon hearing those words. Those years of traveling with the Doctor had built a better and healthier relationship between them. The loss of his nan had played a great role in this new relationship too. Ryan had wanted nothing more but to be left alone to mourn when Graham wanted to keep the last bond between him and Grace alive. But he had accepted Ryan as his grandson long before she died, the young man was just too stubborn, too dumb to see and accept that truth. And today, they were a family, the Doctor’s family, and none of them was gonna die today.

Before he was tied to the sacrifice altar (or the conversion table), he bent over to take his guards by surprise, pulled two gadgets out of his pockets and crushed them under his bare heel. A thick green smoke filled the room quickly - he’d have to thank the Doctor for this trick – and blind them all. He ran in the direction he had last seen Graham and Yaz. It was hard to navigate through the panicked crowd trying to escape the smoke and soon he was lost among them. Several times he thought he saw the two persons he was looking for but it wasn’t them.

The smoke was dissipating now and soon he would be back to square one. He had to get out of this room before the Cybermen could catch him. He headed in the direction where the door was according to his memories. It was a lost cause. He couldn’t find his way. He was getting desperate when a hand caught his, when a voice he had only heard once in his life screamed something to him with a hint of amusement that could totally have come from the Doctor:

“Run!”


	10. They look so pretty when they bleed

There was nothing pretty about this place. It was nauseating to even walk through the long and barely lit corridors. It was enough to see the blood covering the walls and the ground. Fresh blood still dripping and soaking the soil making it look like blood was sweating from the ground beneath their feet. The metallic smell was heady and was covering even the stale, mould and earth odours. But not the overwhelming smell of putrefaction. Body putrefaction. Bodies that had been abandoned in empty rooms like rubbish, left to rot like they were nothing. Bodies that had been slaughtered, dismembered, partly turned into robots. A Cyberman conversion gone wrong. New kind of Cybermen. Human-like Cybermen. No armour of steel but all the wires and circuits implanted underneath their skin. Many deaths for a hopefully failed experience.

Some were still alive when they had been thrown there. Barely alive but still enough to drag their broken bodies on the ground and leave trails of blood that ended where they had expired their last breath. You had to step over these bodies to keep walking through the corridors and go deeper in this underground structure. No survivor had been found so far. Had they been too late? Would they find anyone alive in this complex? The probability was getting lower and lower with every body they were coming across. The amount of blood and bodies eventually lessened and vanished as they were progressing. They were on alert, keeping their emotions at bay not to let the uneasiness nagging at them overwhelm them and disturb them on this life or death mission. Lives were at stake, and they had to save them.

They came to a stop at the end of the corridor when two different directions were offered to them. There were words on the wall they were facing, words that turned their blood to ice, words written with fresh blood: ‘they look so pretty when they bleed, don’t you agree?’ The words seemed to have been placed there for them to read them. The sadistic bastards thought it was a game and they were playing with the new players that had come to save the others. There weren’t many cameras around here and they had hacked their signals anyway for them to play the same images in a loop and hide their presence… it seemed to have been a useless precaution. They knew rescue was here and their twisted minds was finding it fun. They were on their territory and if things went wrong… they wouldn’t all come out of here alive, but the risk was necessary to save many lives.

They picked the left direction and went down flights of stairs. The stale and mould smells were stronger there. It was ticking their nose as they kept going at a silent pace and checking all the rooms they could find. There was an observation room with lots of screen and a pile of files waiting for them on the desk. The screens were displaying images of different people. People who were alive. But were the cameras live or was it another trick from the gamemasters? Hadn’t it all been set like this for them to find?

“Professor, you should have a look at this.”

The professor turned around, held the beam of their torch toward the wall. Hundreds of pictures and names were hanging on the whole wall and connected to each other with notes, numbers and threads of different colours. In the middle of this organised wall were thirteen pictures. The thirteen known faces of the Doctor. They had been the target from the start. The others were collateral damages.

“You should have a look at this too.” Sounds of pages turned. “ _Contestant thirteen is causing issues. We had to punish her._ […] _Burying them alive was fun, but we had to take them out of their box before they died. They are too precious._ […] _Contestant thirteen has been taken to the upgrade room. They had successfully been implanted._ […] _Activation was a success. Contestant thirteen is a total success._ ”

There were pictures accompanying those terrifying words. Pictures of the Doctor in their different stages of captivity. Pictures of the Doctor during the surgery. Pictures of the upgraded Doctor working for her captors.

“We gotta find them all now,” ordered the Professor sharply.

“This isn’t gonna be simple… Err… The last line says “ _contestant thirteen has disappeared. They worked their way out of our control and vanished from our screens. The signal is lost._ ”

“Looks like they kept their old habits of causing troubles.”

The Professor smiled to themselves. The Doctor was still the Doctor. Searching their way out of this sick game. They were still alive, somewhere. It was up to them to find where before it was too late. First, they plugged a flash drive on the main screen and downloaded the data to upload them on their wrist device. A map of the place and the location of every person still alive could be useful.

They went through the pile of files and slipped some in their backpack. The Doctor’s was one of them. This file had to be destroyed as soon as possible, but they would need it to reverse what had been done to the Time Lord, and possibly to other survivors.

“I’ll need two teams of cleaners down there once this is finished,” the Professor declared through the commdot. “I want all these people to be identified and buried decently. Then, we’ll blow up this place.”

The navigation through the endless underground maze was easier now they had the map. There were dots of different colours signalling the position of every ‘contestant’. They only had to follow them to free everyone, and be careful of their enemies that must be hiding in every corner

They didn’t meet anyone until they reached the prisoners’ level. There, cameras, Cybermen and guards everywhere. The situation turned into one of these scenes written by Quentin Tarantino with realism. The blood loss was much more impressive when it was real and not all of them would come back home tonight. They had all known the risks when they signed up for that mission. They all were there to save the Doctor and her companions, and all the other prisoners of this complex.

The Doctor would be afflicted to see such a massacre. She was against weapons, against any kind of bloodbath. She would be mad at them for this, but had they had a choice? They were only shooting to protect themselves against the fire of the enemy. It wasn’t pleasant to take a life. It was traumatising, and therapy was mandatory when you belonged to any kind of armed corps. Even, when it was to save your life, it was hard to see the bullet go through a body, to see the surprise and pain and fear as life left someone, to see the body hit the ground like a puppet free of its strings.

The Professor managed to sneak out of the slaughter and went unnoticed toward the cells. They were all empty and sounds of panic were heard farther down in the building. Something had happened. They had arrived at an inconvenient time for the gamemasters. Green thick smoke was floating in front of us. They pulled on gas masks just in case it was toxic, although their wrist devices indicated that it wasn’t, and ventured into the smoke. It was hard to see anything and they bumped into a group of other people coming their way. Immediately, weapons were aimed at the newcomers who all raised their hands. Except one.

“Friend or foe, identify!”

“Don’t shoot! We’re surrendering!” yelled another voice.

The map identified them as escaped prisoners. The Professor ordered the men accompanying them to lower their weapons. The names they were given were the names of the current companions of the Doctor, but she wasn’t with them. Captain Jack, an old acquaintance of the Professor, was with them but didn’t look good. Internal bleeding after a fight to defend his new friends. He wasn’t gonna last long.

“Where’s the Doctor?”

“No idea! They kept her separated from the rest of us.”

“We need help. Lots of other people are still down there.”

The team was divided in two. A group led the companions outside where they were taken in charge for medical cares while the other group rushed in the building to find the other survivors. However, they couldn’t find the Doctor. Wherever she was, she had hidden well to protect herself and didn’t come out upon hearing the ruckus. This was unusual coming from her. The Doctor was irresistibly attracted to danger and was always showing up when it was ringing. The fact that she wasn’t was quite worrying with everything written in her file…


	11. Psych 101

She was alone. This statement imposed itself to her mind long before she managed to open her eyelids heavy with an exhaustion that was more mental than physical. These few hours of sleep had done her good physically. She was feeling much better than when she had slipped into the warm comforting arms of Morpheus. Or maybe someone else’s arms. It wasn’t clear. She wasn’t alone, and now she was. She wasn’t good at being alone. She never had been. Yet, this solitude was quite welcome at the moment. After the past few days – had it been days, or just hours? it was all so confused in her head – trusting people was an ability she had lost. She had never been good at trusting people, always sharing the tiniest bits of her with people, hiding the most important and frightening behind a mask.

The world swam and slid before her eyes when she turned her head to survey her surroundings. Everything was the exact same as it was when she slipped into the darkness of a sleep without dreams. For all she could remember. She was so stunned when she was brought here that she hadn’t given much attention to what was around her. All that mattered was the feeling of safety she had been craving for and the presence of a long time friend and foe who never actually managed to lay a harmful hand on her preferring using her weak points instead by threatening her companions, by threatening the safety of humans, of Earth, of the Universe. He had admitted off his own that it was the only way he had to draw her attention on him. He was still particularly bitter that she ran away from Gallifrey without him.

He wasn’t around. Hadn’t been for a while. His warmth, his smell were gone. She was left on her own. Abandoned. And that hurt more than she would actually like to admit. She hugged herself tighter to fill the hole left in her hearts by his absence, by the truth that she was alone in the universe. Who was she? Where did she come from? Had she had a family? Had they abandoned her in this universe for some reason? Or had she been running after danger like she always did? How dangerous had she become for the Time Lords to erase her memory? What had they done to her? What had they made her do with the Division? She had felt so guilty for condemning them all in the Time War, so devastated to have lost them all by the hand of the Master. Koschei. Her only friend from the start.

She was dozing off when the door slammed open. She jerked out of sleep, jumped out the bed. She stood on her feet, body in defence position, completely alert, completely alert and ready to fight anyone coming for her. A person in full black dress combat with a helmet and tinted visor. Nothing was giving away the identity of this person. There wasn’t even a name on the thick bulletproof vest. Just a dark silhouette. A single detail drew the Doctor’s attention though: no weapon. Their hands were empty, there was none on their belt, none on their ankles. An unarmed soldier. This was a singular sight. What kind of soldier didn’t carry weapons on them? _You are that soldier_ , she thought to herself. _You are a soldier who never carries a gun._ But she didn’t have an armour either unlike this person.

“Don’t you worry, I’m here to help.”

“Koschei?”

The silhouette shook their head, confused about the name, confused about the Doctor’s reaction to their presence. They realised it was because of the way they were dressed so they grabbed the helmet and unfastened it. The Doctor’s defiance decreased by half when she saw the face of her rescuer. Yaz. Yaz had managed to blend in and come to her rescue. But how had she managed to find her when she was so isolated from all the others contestants of this insane game? Wasn’t it too easy?

“We have to go now, before they find you.”

“How did you get here? How did you find me?”

Yaz tapped her ear, implicitly telling her that her ear implant was also giving away her position to whoever had the right frequency and code to follow the signal. Yaz couldn’t do that, but she could have broken free and sneaked into the gamemasters station. She would have seen her signal and would have rushed here, ignoring what she would find. She turned around. She had seen more than she should have. She was a monster. Disfigured and partially upgraded. Turned into a monster. She was defiant of everyone, but also of herself. She had no control on the situation.

“I can’t save you.” Her voice broke. “Even if get out of this room.”

She was safe here. She was isolated from everything like she had been in prison. Alone, isolated, left to rot with no hope to come out of this cold cell one day. The return to her TARDIS had been a hard one. Overwhelming should she said. Her senses had been assaulted by an increased perception of her surrounding that were loud, warm, populated. She who had grown not to feel anything anymore, she who had become an empty shell had struggled against this overload, had pushed her friends away, had locked herself in a replica of her cell from which they had had to drag her out. She had had relearn how to leave on society, how to be around people without the strong envy of retreating in a dark corner, how to come back to the shadow of the woman she had been before. She hadn’t had a proper night of sleep since she was out of this prison.

If she had been in Stormcage, she would have had an identifier tattoo, but she had nothing to prove that she had been a prisoner at all for years in a prison lost in a forgotten part of the universe. Nothing but her broken mind and the abandoned red jumpsuit on the floor of her bathroom. Sometimes she was putting it back on and lying on the cold tiled ground. She had never been free and she would never be. Wherever she was going, she found herself shackled in a twisted plan. She used to fight them all, used to work for everyone’s good. Not anymore. Not after this blow on the unstable card castle she was. She was giving in; she was letting them use her as a hitman to do their dirty work. She had had enough. She was tired, and now was time to stop struggling against everything and accept her fate. She wasn’t herself anymore.

She smiled sadly at her friend, another one she was letting down, and choked on the sob strangling her. Yaz couldn’t have found her here. The signal was scrambled. She was nowhere to be seen on the screens. She had taken her chance and disappeared from the game. And now she was hallucinating. She ignored that her mind still had the strength to do that. Even when you were far beyond your limits, you could still be surprised.

“You can’t be here, Yaz. You’re just a production of my sick mind.”

She was crying for real now. There was no use in holding back the tears when it was already flowing down her cheeks. She was being too emotional. She was overwhelmed by her emotions, all the time. She had no control over them since she had gotten them back after a period of emotional and physical numbness that had lasted for a long while.

“I’m crazy, not dumb.”

She was laughing through her tears, laughing at the situation, at her madness. Her emotions were becoming uncontrollable, and the now familiar buzzing in her brain indicated her that soon, she would feel nothing anymore…


	12. I think I've broken something

The pain was shooting through her leg in relentless waves. An as familiar as unfamiliar sort of pain that pushed her out of the pit of darkness she had fallen into some time ago. She wouldn’t be able to tell when that fall had happened. Probably not so long ago according to her hearts furiously pumping blood, the white hot pain in her leg, her pounding head, the fact that there was no one around -which was a good thing in her case – the smell of fresh blood that was without a doubt hers. She fell, blacked out and woke up because of the pain. But what had she been doing in the first place? How had she ended up here, in this flight of stairs? How had she fallen? Had she tripped or been pushed? Something was beeping repeatedly in her ear, echoing the sound of the hammer hitting around her skull and driving her crazy.

She forced her eyes open to survey her surroundings. Her body was lying limp, head and upper chest on the cold landing while the rest of her person, from waist to toes, was on the steps of this nasty staircase that had caused her to fall. The pain in her leg was easily and quickly explained by its improbable angle and bone pointing out. A fracture. A bad one at that. She couldn’t fix that herself. She could t even move from here. She needed help. But where to find help in a building full of people that wanted you to be the perfect puppet in their hands? They had only partially converted her. Her right arm, the left side of her face. A fragile and discreet technology that was absorbed by the skin of the subject and connecting to their nerves. Something marvellous for technology addicts. An absolute horror for her.

She made an attempt at moving. Her leg had to stay still but the rest of her could find a more comfortable position. She cried out. The pain was terrible. Moving was out of question until her leg was fixed. She would have to accept help. Any kind of help. She wished the Master to be there for once, but he was out of sight. Better not to have him around actually. He would laugh and make sure to immortalise the moment forever in his sick mind to remind it to her whenever they would meet again. No, they couldn’t meet again. They would never meet again. He was dead and gone, wasn’t he? The Time Lords, the Cybermasters, the Master, Gallifrey, Ko Sharmus… All of this, all she ever had… It had been sucked into the Bermuda Triangle of space created by the Death Particle. She had nothing and no one anymore.

“Oh, please, tell me that she’s alive.”

The voice of a woman broke through the fog of her mind. Warm hands were touching her, checking her pulse, checking that she was alive. Her chest was rising and falling quickly to the rhythm of her irregular breathing. It was leaving her dizzy. She was seeing double when she managed to open her eyes again, to leave her numb unconsciousness making her forget that she was in pain. Her lips curled into a smile. That was a pleasant sight. One of her friends had found her. Not in the best of shapes but that was help she would gladly take.

“They told me they only wanted to run a couple tests on you, that they wouldn’t hurt you.”

These were caring words, but the tone was cold. Very unlike to the tone this person was using when talking to her. Not the kind of words they would use to talk to her either. Something was wrong in the way they talked, and acted and smiled. In the sight they made.

“Look at what they’ve done of you. A broken puppet. Nothing extravagant, or extraordinary anymore.”

“Yaz,” she croaked.

“It took me so long to get into their organisation and to keep it away from you and your constant nosing around. And they ruined it all in a snap of fingers.”

The sound echoed in her empty mind. She was trying to process what she was hearing, what she was feeling. A stab in the hearts. What was that song already? _True friends stab you in the front_. She had found it stupid, but wasn’t it always like this? Wasn’t it always her friends stabbing her in the cruellest of ways? Her trust had been broken so many times but she never learnt. She never would, would she?

“Yaz,” she tried again.

“You were all so focused on being the eccentric exuberant renegade that you didn’t notice when I changed side.”

“He convinced you. He took you to the dark side.”

Yaz snorted, “There’s no good and bad side. You should know that better than anyone else in this universe and beyond. All is chaos.”

Her breath was coming out in quick puffs, her hearts were racing, her brain was numb and everything was a blur around her. Her hands were contorting on the ground, her body was tense and the pain was pulsing through her broken leg. A panic attack. She was having a panic attack and only the sound of drums was coming to her ears. She was alone, she was in pain, she was at the mercy of her enemy. An enemy that had chosen the face of a woman she had loved and valued, a woman that was part of her fam, a woman that had never hesitated in running away with her… maybe she should have been suspicious but all of her companions before her had shown this recklessness while travelling with her. It had killed many of them… but never had they turned against her willingly. Or had they? She ignored so much about herself. About her past. About the many lives she had been forced to forget.

“He would have loved seeing you like this. He would have loved being the one pushing you over the edge and watch the exact moment you would break down when you would find out he turned me against you.”

“You’re wrong ‘bout him. He coaxed you with pretty words, pushed you to believe **_he_** was the good one in that story. I’ve known him forever. He was my friend. The Time Lords did him wrong, and he looked for revenge all his life. **_I_** was the one he could never destroy.”

“And you **_murdered_** him.”

“I haven’t pressed that button.”

“You’ve let it happen!”

“He would have turned you into one of his monsters and sent you to death without a second thought. Or worse. You’ve seen what he’s done with the Kassavins…”

“It was **_brilliant_** as one would say.”

“He really brainwashed you.”

She felt sorry for her friend who had fallen to the end of her best enemy, her old friend who had become a foe, a friend who had always worked to get **_her_** attention and approval in everything he had done. He even burnt an entire planet and killed an entire population for what had been done to her, to him. Their bond was more complicated and couldn’t be explained.

“What promises had he done for you to follow him, Yaz? What did he offer to you?”

Her words were tumbling out of her mouth as the anxiety and pain were rising. She felt exhausted and was clinging to this pain to keep herself awake and not fall back into a pit of darkness that would probably sign the end of this life of hers. She would burn and come back to life and still be a prisoner of this hell.

“Immortality. He noticed my feelings for you and promised me to give that forever I was dreaming of in my corner. I would have been able to follow you forever. But you killed him before he could give me anything!”

“He was

“He was pulling on your strings. Never would be have done anything for you.”

There was sadness mixed with anger in Yaz’s eyes and for a second, she thought she had managed to reach her, to reason her, the kind and brave Yaz she had always known, but that was before the woman let the rage win and violently pressed her hand on the broken bone of her leg. She cried out from the intense pain she was experiencing; dark dots filled her vision field and that was it. She was gone again.


	13. Breathe In Breathe Out

Blinding neon lights above her head. Blink. Stone ceilings with cracks and mould. Blink. Another neon light. Blink. Air moving around her. Body laying uncomfortably on a flat surface. Blink. Indistinct voices around her. Blink. Blurry silhouettes surrounding her. Fear clutching her hearts. What were they about to do to her? Blink. A flashback. Yaz. Her friend Yasmin Khan standing above her with an expression she didn’t recognise. An expression of pure evil. An expression so similar to the one her oldest friend was wearing on their face. She struggled. They had done enough harm to her. She must find Ryan and Graham. Unless… were they a part of this plan too? Had they turned their backs on her and chosen the dark side? No, the Master only had found interest in Yaz. Graham had been given his chance on Ranskoor Av Kolos and chose to be the better man. And Ryan was a pure soul… she believed in him. She believed he couldn’t be corrupted by darkness.

But what if? What if they had all betrayed her? What if they were all responsible for this? She struggled, ignoring the breathtaking pain irradiating from her leg and all the way up to her whole body. The voices increased; hands kept her down on the hard surface; strapped her down so she wouldn’t move. They gave her something to drink. She struggled more. She refused to drink anything coming from them. She spilled water on her face and neck by moving too much. She choked on it. There was a bunch of curses and the bottle was put away. They hadn’t stopped moving. They were still rushing toward a destination she was dreading for what could be done to her again. She wished she had her sonic. She could have gotten rid of those straps so easily then. And what would she have done them? Running away on one leg? No. She was screwed.

The drops of water rolling in her mouth while she coughed had a particular taste she couldn’t quite identify. It was water from Earth. Twenty-first century Earth. There were thousands of brands and she could identify them all by taste. That one was new, or modified. Modified was her opinion on the matter, an opinion made from the change of chemistry in her brains. They had given her something that wasn’t working immediately unlike what you could see in the movies, something that was slowly making its way in her system. It wasn’t a fluid paralysing her but keeping her aware of her surroundings. It was putting her pain to sleep, as well as numbing her mind from the terror attacking her brain cells and preventing her from thinking properly. They were putting her out like they did when they had buried her alive.

Obviously that thought wasn’t to reassure her and she fought the effects of the fluid on her system. It didn’t help that she had two hearts beating out a samba and a high blood pressure that could be both an advantage and an inconvenience. In this case, it was an inconvenience as it was conveying the drugs faster to her organs and depriving her from her freedom of moves. She was a prisoner of them, and a prisoner of her own body and mind. A perspective that wasn’t very encouraging for her survival. It was like being in prison all over again. It was the same, really. Locked in a cage most of the day, being told when to eat, when to sleep, when to work out. She could have said she had been treated better in jail… but not even. Surrounded by enemies that had been imprisoned there because of her, she had been harassed continually and threatened of permanent death more times than the tallies on the wall of her cell could tell.

“You can sleep, sweetie. It’s over. We’re taking good care of you.”

Her lips smiled tiredly. There was only one person in the whole universe to call her ‘sweetie’. Old immortal friends tended to resurface in these difficult times for her. She hadn’t expected the return of that one person but she was okay with it. It meant she either was hallucinating (again) or in good hands (better than hallucinations).

Her eyes fluttered open slowly. Her body was pleasantly numb from the grip of the drugged sleep she had been plunged in. Somewhere around her, there was a muffled conversation she couldn’t distinctly hear even with her enhanced senses. If she could focus, it would be easier, but her mind was drifting toward the unpleasant feeling of stretch in her leg, toward the oppressing feeling in her chest.

“—a case of delayed drowning—”

“—common—”

“Not really—”

She was only hearing bits that made no sense and couldn’t catch the meaning of that talk. She was struggling to keep her eyes open, but at the same time, she couldn’t fall into her comfortable cocoon as her chest was on fire. That invisible fire was aspiring all her oxygen and leaving her lungs with nothing, constraining her to a shortness of breath. She coughed to get rid of that feeling. It tore off her throat.

“River…” she croaked.

She was trying to speak but the words wouldn’t make it out of her numb mouth. Her tongue wouldn’t move. The thoughts in her head made no sense. Cold hands caught in plastic touched her arms, her chest, her neck. Something was placed on her face. Pure oxygen was thrown in her face but wouldn’t pass through her throat.

“—ing worse—”

“Got results—”

“Symptoms suggest—”

Was it Rose sitting beside her and holding her hand reassuringly while she was diving back into darkness? They hadn’t seen each other in years but she was happy to see her again. She smiled through the mask on her face, raised a hand (why did her skin look so red, so grazed?) and touched the face of the woman she had loved – still loved – with all her hearts and soul.

“You are sick. Something serious. They’re trying to determine what you have so they can heal you.”

If she could talk, she could have helped them to help her. She could have told them what had been done to her so they could have a clearer view on her case. She could even figure it out before them and tell them what she was suffering from.

“They’ve ruled out a couple things, including a possible septicaemia caused by your broken leg. Their latest lead is chemical pneumonia. It matches all your symptoms.”

‘Am I gonna die?’ Dying was impossible for her but she could regenerate into another person, and she didn’t want to. Not yet. These eyes still had so much more to see, these legs had so many miles left to run. She wasn’t ready to say goodbye. Say goodbye to who? Did she still have friends? Had they all let her down? Betrayed her? It hurt so much.

“She’s awake.”

“It’s too soon. We gotta keep her under.”

Keep her under. Under what? Her mind was so confused. Where was she? _Who_ was she? It was a question she still hadn’t found an answer to. What was her name? No one was saying it as if she was a Jane Doe. She had been found, taken out of the devil’s claws and was now stuck in an episode of _House M.D_ with her as the dying patient and no diagnosis. That was frankly scary, and there was nothing she could do about that.


	14. Is something burning?

“ _It doesn’t matter how hard you will fight us, how far you will run from us. You can try all you want to vanish into thin air, and even if we are defeated by yourself or friends of yours, you will never forget about us. You will always belong to us, and_ this _is how you will be reminded of our existence every single day of your miserable lives._ ”

_A leather-clad hand grabbed the long black metal shaft hanging out of the brazier in which the ornamented tip of it was gathering warmth and glowing red in the half-light of the room. The burning embers were throwing their orangish glow around the cast iron caldron and its immediate surroundings._

_She was shackled to the ground, gathered in a miserable heap among the chains that were too heavy for her to even lift her hands. She was so small, so vulnerable siting there and they were enjoying the sight of her in this condition. She felt so ashamed and disgusted by herself. She had fallen so low. The Master would be delighted to be offered such a spectacle. He was actually. She could see him bouncing and clapping like an overexcited child on Christmas morning. His eyes were so dark, contradicting this apparent jubilation. It was his creation, this game, and he wasn’t even there to devour every second of it. And the idea of someone else touching her was infuriated him. She was his, and his only._

_The tip was still glowing with a dark orange colour, so dark you could think it was red. She swallowed. The metal was literally on fire, but not hot enough to melt; just got enough to forever damage someone’s skin. That was about to happen to her. She swallowed She swallowed hard, her brains working on a hundred plans at once to get out of this situation safely. But the chains and her miserable condition were real impediments to the success of any of these plans._

_Hands grabbed her dirty ripped T-shirt and tore it more to expose the pale skin of her chest. Those same hands held her still and she refused to give them the pleasure to hear her scream. She locked her eyes on her opponent, she was challenging him to come and touch her with that branding shaft. There was a smile on their lip. She bit the inside of her cheeks when the fire touched her skin and burnt her chest and filled the room with a nauseating smell. The taste of blood rolled on her tongue and tears glimmered at the corner of her eyes but she made no sound, and she didn’t cry. She put her brace face on._

_Oh the rage in their eyes as she fixed them straight in the eyes defiantly without a sound. They never got a word, a cry or a scream. Not even when they pulled the shaft away from the body it was embed in, ripping away bits of her skin in the process and leaving a bloody red wound on her chest and spreading an unpleasant nauseating smell in the room._

_“Make sure this doesn’t get infected. She has to stay alive.”_

_And it was a mark she would keep forever. Unless the regeneration saved her that humiliation with a brand new body and perfect skin. She would gladly accept it unlike the Corsair who always felt naked without their tattoo. Hopefully she wouldn’t keep that mark forever. But if it was a plan created by the Master – and the fact it was_ **his** _Gallifreyan name they had just burnt her skin with – they would have made sure she would keep it beyond that incarnation_

The nauseating smell of her burnt skin filled her nose and tickled her tongue so much that it made her retch. Her body was free from its shackles and obeyed her movements when she turned around to avoid choking on her own vomit. It would be one of the stupidest deaths she would ever have gone through. She coughed and dry-heaved but nothing came out of her mouth beside saliva. Her stomach burnt from the nothingness she was puking. When was the last time she had even eaten?

“There, rinse your mouth with this.”

A strong American accent. A glass of water. A bucket near her bed. A warm hand rubbing her back. She pulled herself together. She was in foreign surroundings again. What did they have in store for her again? Her chest hurt, her leg hurt, her head hurt, but she put the brave face on and faced her new interlocutor. It was a small woman with dark hair, a blind eye crossed by a long scar going from her temple to her nose, tattooed arms, and a lot of scars on her wrists and arms and hands. A warrior, a fighter. Someone who had been tortured.. With an unpleasant smell of wet dog, and something else. Something spicy. Something dangerous and forbidden. And authority. Yet, nothing hostile. It was help. Real help.

Her hand was shaking when her fingers circled around the cool glass. It was tempting to press it against her forehead to refresh herself. She used it to rinse her mouth and spat the water in the bucket. The second glass of water that was placed against her lips. Her muscles were cramped. Her brains were overwhelmed with signals of pain. Had she ever felt this miserable before?

“You were found in the ruins of an old forbidden laboratory by a team a mine. We were intervening in the era when we discovered the place and what was going on inside. Took us a few days to organise a rescue mission. It was successful. All the responsible have been arrested and you’ve been placed under my cares.”

“We’ve met before.”

“A long time ago for you. Wouldn’t have recognised you with this new face.”

The woman grabbed a wet cloth and ran it over her face. It was much appreciated from her. She felt clammy, almost feverish, but something was telling her that she might have been in a worse condition before waking up. She wanted to sit up which wasn’t a good idea. She remained still on this comfortable bed. It was much better than one she had a few days ago. Or was it weeks? Hard to tell.

“You were in a rough condition,” continued the woman. She had rolled her sleeves up and long fingers were now massaging her sore muscles. “I took care of you myself. Immobilised your leg. Watched over you during your feverish delirium. You were suffering from a curious mix of pneumonia and heat exhaustion. As well as a serious malfunction of your internal systems. Technology and biological systems. That doesn’t work. Even with someone as advanced as you are.”

Malfunctions in her system. She certainly meant the printed circuits that had been implanted in her while she was unconscious and at their mercy. Her words weren’t implying that she had done this to herself. She was right. It had been done to her. She would never have done such a thing to herself. Not in that life or in any other.

“We’ve deactivated them. We wanted to remove them all but it is tangled in your nervous system. We’ve removed the ear implant and put the rest out of order. Definitely. No one can control you with it anymore.”

It was a relief for the Time Lord. Not a full relief though. The printed circuits were still inside her. It was tangled to her nervous system, and she still looked like an android. A partly robotic woman. She was disgusted by what she had become unwillingly. As if she didn’t have enough to deal with at the moment. She was gonna have to learn to live with the ‘truth’ about her origins, with the mystery around her lives, with this ‘new’ self that was newer now, with the trauma of that new experience…


	15. Into the unknown

“How does it feel, being possessed?”

The werewolf facing her laughed heartily. The question had nothing funny to it but it was so random that it had taken her off guard. She would never have thought that the Time Lord would ask such a question. She was one of the most ancient creatures that universe could count. You would believe that they knew about it all. Or almost it all. There always was something new to learn in life.

“Why that question?”

“Curiosity.”

“Curiosity doesn’t come out of nowhere.”

She observed the werewolf silently. Her name was Katlyn, she remembered now. Katlyn Itachi. Heir of a lineage of powerful witches, child of a formerly forbidden union between a werewolf and a witch, child of the prophecy that stated that a wolf entirely white would come and deliver the supernatural community from the chains and prejudices and cruel laws it had been suffering from for centuries. It hadn’t been easy as you could say with the scars covering the visible skin of her arms, hands and neck. Her face hadn’t been spared either. After accepting her status of Chosen One and working hard to reform the laws and rules, to form alliances and set a whole new system of education and training, she had had to face one of her family’s oldest foe, the spirit of an Ancient vampire named Iktar Namodu who stole her body until he could get his back, and caused damages beyond repairs in the supernatural community and to the woman’s body like her blind could prove.

“It’s not a pleasant experience.”

“I can imagine.”

“I’d say it’s like being buried alive. You are aware of everything but you can’t do anything except for struggling against the darkness threatening to swallow you. If you let that happen, you know that’s the end for you. You’re stuck in a box that’s too small, a box that’s becoming smaller and smaller with every hour. The undesirable parasite that stole your body invades every little corner of your corporal shell, pushes you out, suffocates you until the last bit of you dies. Two souls can’t inhabit one body, the fight is often fatal to one of them.”

“Do you… do you remember what you do when the other is dominant?”

“Only if you are conscious. Sometimes, you choose to shut down temporarily, to keep some strengths for another battle. I managed to separate my spirit, my soul or whatever you call it from my body once. It’s a very unsettling experience. I was glad to be back to my body. But whether you shut yourself down or leave your body, the result is the same. You have no memory of it.”

“That’s what they did to me. When… when they were activating these damn circuits. They were shutting me down and using my body and I have no idea what I did. I didn’t dare having a look at the system’s memory.”

“I did. If that’s reassuring you, you haven’t killed anyone. They mostly used you as a soldier doing rounds. If they commanded you to do the dirty work, you refused to cooperate. Proof that a part of you was interfering with their ‘so perfect’ system.”

“Or that means they have to learn more about how Time Lord’s biology works. Not as easy to manipulate as a human.”

“Close but not enough.”

“Superior biology.”

“Might be.”

The werewolf went back to eating the contents of the plate in front of her, keeping an eye on her patient. She had barely moved from here since the Time Lord had arrived. She was often called for important matters that she was quickly handling from this room before returning to the alien. Her recovery was exceptionally quick. Sure she couldn’t walk yet on her two feet. Her leg needed time to recover from the complicated fracture it was suffering from and it was immobilised for a certain time. It was annoying of course, but that was the price to pay when you were running into troubles all the time.

“Speaking of that, weren’t you studying medicine at some point in your life?”

“I did. Even got my certifications. I’m a doctor. I just chose to I just chose to take care of the people from my community instead of normal humans.”

“Don’t you have, you know, a magical cure? After all, you’re a hybrid. The healing powers of a werewolf and the powers of a witch. That’s not nothing.”

Katlyn’s face darkened. Obviously, it was a sensitive subject. Something she would rather forget. Something that was haunting her every day.

“A human scientist found about me one day. I wasn’t myself at that moment. An Ancient vampire had taken possession of me and I was struggling. It made it easier for him and his co-workers to get their hands on me. They were They were draining my blood every day and analysing it to / separate my human genes from my ‘supernatural’ genes. It was a massacre when the vampire woke up, furious. But one of them survived and continued his researches in the deepest of secrets. We’ve found him during a mission. Dead. He had decided to try the result of his results on himself. He didn’t survive the first change. Didn’t even go to the end of it. Science gone wrong.”

“At least, it died with him and you got rid of the body.”

Katlyn pouted. Things hadn’t been that easy. They never were when you had to get rid of a body, and ever more when you were the indirect cause of their death. The Time Lord had seen many bodies, many lives that ended too soon because of her and the look on the werewolf’s face showed that she also had seen too many bodies. It wouldn’t be surprising considering she had intervened in many fights and was head of a large community of supernatural creatures. She was dealing daily with werewolves, but also with vampires and witches, shapeshifters and hybrids. High responsibilities on the shoulders of such a young woman. Well, everyone was young in her book. She ignored how old she was herself, but she was older than Katlyn for sure.

“He tested it on his daughter too. A young girl. Couldn’t be older than 4 or 5 back then. I’m not that impressive but…”

“Everyone can feel your aura. You might be short, but your aura makes you look twice your size, if not more.”

“That, and the scars and tattoos.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“It worked on his daughter. I had to bring her back with us. It took us months to reach her behind the walls she had built to protect herself from the strangers who had taken her from her home and finally be able to train her like the others kids. Probably one of the hardest missions I’ve done. Especially so early after my last fight with that vampire. I was still recovering from my wounds.”

“No magical healing for you.”

“Silver doesn’t overlook. I’ve been wounded so many times with it that my body has developed an allergy to it. Our best scientists work on a cure. They already synthetised a ‘recovery helper’ from my blood. We barely use it for now.”

“Why not?”

If she was given the chance to heal faster without regenerating completely, she would gladly take it. Those few days she had been bedridden were like weeks to her. It reminded her of her time in space jail, although she was moving around there. Going from a cage to another. From the bubble of her incessant thoughts to a mind overcrowded with threats, from solitude to hostile surroundings with enemies wherever her gaze set. The thought alone ruined her appetite. She put her plate away for now.

Katlyn was silent. She was choosing not to answer her question. To avoid the Time Lord next demand certainly. If such a ‘recovery helper’ existed, if she was compatible, she would want it to go back to running, and the werewolf thought that she wasn’t ready yet. They were using her own condition against her. They were using her physical recovery to make sure she was mentally and emotionally ready. But what if she was not? What would they do then?


	16. A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

She didn’t need to be asleep for the horrors to come and torment her. She just had to be alone for the memories of different traumas she had lived through her lives to fill her mind. For a long time, she had tortured herself with the Time War; the incessant fights against the Daleks and other enemies, the battles she had lost, the friends she missed and then, the Master came back with a new face and added a new layer of trauma on her shoulders. As if she hadn’t had enough already. Now she was forever gonna wonder who she was; where she was from and how many lives had been stolen from her before today. Added to that years in a small cell surrounding by hundreds of foes willing to kill her at any chance they would get and that abduction to participate to a deadly game and you had the tormented mess that she was when her mind was free to wander at night.

The worst for her was to be unable to move freely. Her leg was painful still. The fracture had been bad enough for a surgery to be necessary so the bones would heal properly, and her leg was immobilised for as long as it would take for it to be fully healed. So far, it was doing great, but the pain wouldn’t leave and she couldn’t move. Or just a little with crutches. Katlyn had found a pair for her to try but she hadn’t yet. Where would she go anyway? She was compelled to stay on the werewolf’s property. She was without a TARDIS, and Katlyn was the only thing close to a friend she could have at the moment. It wasn’t a novelty that she was socially awkward, and she wasn’t in a particularly good mood to be social anyway. That abduction had been another stab in the weakened armour she was usually building around her, and she wasn’t ready to be her usual jovial self.

She was herself only in her curiosity. That was a trait of her that never disappeared. Her time jail hadn’t even soothed that bad habit of her. If anything, it had made it worse as she had investigated on every creature surrounding her in the common room. They were all separated by electrified wall, all locked in individual cages where one could see what the other was doing, and she had had the chance to be surrounded by a Weeping Angel, an Ood, a Sycorax, an empty cell. Not the most talkative species in the universe. Not the nicest either. There also was a Pting. It was funny to watch him attempt to eat the cage day after day with the same result. Oh, she tried to. One of her millions tries at running away. They had all been a total failure. That would explain why she had stayed there for so long until Jack came to her rescue.

Jack… She hadn’t seen him since he helped her with the Daleks, since he said goodbye through the phone to go back to his friends at Torchwood. Wait, no. He was there in that game… Yaz was there too. The thought of the bright clever woman with eyes full of wonder and admiration stabbed her in the hearts. Last time she had seen her, she was standing above her and casually telling her that she had been a mole all along, that she had been working for the Master and had made sure she would end up in that game. Her memories about it were kinda blurry. She only had flashes, not real memories. But that was crystal clear in her mind. She had been betrayed by a member of her fam, the one she had been the closest to somehow, the one who was the most eager to go on dangerous adventures with her.

“Does it hurt? I hope it does. Have you ever felt such a pain before? Being betrayed by someone you fancy? It must be heart breaking.”

She ignored the voice singing in her ears and closed her eyes tight. She didn’t want to face him; Not again. The first time she had been desperate enough for her mind to generate the comforting image of a familiar face. It had been a hallucination all along. She had been told everything about how she moved through the complex and fought and hid until they found her and forced her out of her hole. Everything Koschei was supposed to have done for her… she had done it herself.

“You have no idea how pleasurable it had been to turn your beloved companion against you. And how easy it had been to lure her into such a trap. Poor little human, falling in love with the impossible alien and dreaming of love while eating their beans on a toast. So easy it had become boring at some point. You used to travel with cleverer companions. I remember Adric…”

“Oh, do shut up.”

He did not. He laughed at her instead. He was excited, like a kid. That was a trait she used to love so much about him. How he could get excited about the little things. How they could both be excited by the wonders of the universe. Her kind nature had made her a traveller, his rage had made him want to conquer it all… and destroy it all.

“How does it feel, hm? Being locked away, without a friend or an ally? Surrounded by people ho want you dead? And death is your best option. The others are far less merciful.”

“Death is nothing to us.”

“Death is nothing to _you_ , timeless child. I’m stuck with a limited number of regenerations. Another point I’d love to discuss with Tecteun.”

“That was your last one.”

“Whose fault?” Koschei roared.

In two strides, he was in front of her, his hand around her neck, pressing her throat just enough for her to feel the pressure and be bothered by it, but not enough to not be able to breathe. She defied him silently. What could a hallucination do anyway?

“What now?” she snarled. “You’re gonna haunt me forever? Make me believe I’m crazy until I retire from the universe? Force me to beg for mercy?”

He was too late for all of that. The thought of him had been haunting her ever since she left Gallifrey that day. Ever since she condemned Ko Sharmus and the CyberMasters and… **_him_** to a certain death. And she had had over twenty years to think about what she did, and ponder on the questions of identity.

“That would be too easy,” he purred in her ear.

He was all she could see. He was filling her field of vision and having him so close was making her forget about her actual location. He grabbed her arm, raised it, aimed her hand toward the wall behind him. His hand left his throat and he moved just enough for her to see what her hand was aiming at. She was holding a small gun, the index on the trigger, and the cannon was aiming straight on Katlyn’s heart. The werewolf was shackled with silver chains and couldn’t defend herself.

“It’s about time to shoot your hostage, don’t you think?”


	17. I did not see that coming

‘I know what you’ve done. I’m gonna tell.’

She creased the paper in her hand. The words on it were clearly for her. She had committed an unforgivable crime and someone had seen her and threatening her. There was a time she wouldn’t even have cared about something so stupid but not today, not when she was still holding the gun, not when her hand was covered in the blood of a friend who risked her life to save hers. A life that wasn’t even in danger since she was threatened by a hallucination created by a brain who forgot how to work properly after months (years?) of mental and physical torments. Of course she wouldn’t get better on her own but who could she call for help? Her friends were in danger around her. She was unstable and could hurt them unintentionally because she was manipulated by the image of her oldest friend and foe.

Now she was on the run. Sort of. You couldn’t really be on the run when you only had one functional leg and crutches. She had had to be smart, and the fact that the house was empty (which was unusual) had been in her favour. She had dragged herself downstairs, had gone to the kitchen and covered herself in dirt and rubbish (werewolves had an exceptional sense of smell and she didn’t want to be found). Then, she had crossed the entry corridor and turned left to go down in the basement. It was easy to get lost in such a huge property but she remembered the plans of it. The TARDIS had that in store. There was a secret passage down there, hidden in plain sight and she had used it. She had hidden in the sewers underneath the town since then. And that morning, she had woken up to those words tucked under the arm she was using as a pillow.

Those words were holding a terrible power on her. The author of that note obviously knew about her dirty secret (secrets?) and they were threatening her of telling everything to everyone. She had to stay hidden from the whole world for a while, until they forgot about her, until the world was a better place again. Who was she kidding? When had the world been a good place at all? She should have remained in her cell. She would have been much safer than she was now and none of that would have happened at all. Yaz wouldn’t have betrayed her; Graham and Ryan would have gotten on with their lives without her and Katlyn… Katlyn would still be alive. For a pacifist, she was taking too many lives, and it was a lot to take in. Maybe jail was her right place to be in the end. Or even better for the world: she should have pressed that button and died with the Master.

“Look how miserable you look now. And it’s only been a few days. Imagine what it felt like to hide in the dark for 77 years!”

“Shut up,” she groaned.

She had a growing headache and the heat mixed to the stench of the sewers she had been living in weren’t helping with it, nor did they help with the sickness in her stomach caused by the overwhelming anxiety she was facing. And he was laughing at the poor little thing in pain she had become, and she was now laughing too. That was it. She was losing her mind.

“That was your plan all along, then?” she laughed. “Turning my life upside down, pushing me to ponder on my identify, turning my friends against me, physically and mentally destroying me until I end up with nothing but myself and your image.”

“Yeah,” he chuckled in return. “And that’s even better than what I hoped!”

“You’d love it better if you were alive.”

The jeering expression on his face turned to a darker one, with the slight pout of a child whose plans had been thwarted. But it was brief. His face was quickly brightened by one of those devilish grins again. She hated it so much and wanted to tear it off his face with her bare hands. /

“Oh dear, it’s so much funnier to live freely in your mind and torment you every tiny second of your miserable existence.”

That was the last straw. She used her good leg to lurch toward him and wrap her hands around his neck but missed her shot and landed flat on her stomach, head first in freshly painted letters: ‘I know what you’ve done.’ She raised her head. The words were everywhere around her, some painted in blood, the blood of her dead friend. ‘MURDERER’. The same words over and over again. Everywhere. Surrounding her. Wrongly accusing her of a crime she would never have committed if she had been her normal safe. If she wasn’t losing her mind.

“It wasn’t me,” she muttered. “IT WASN’T ME! I DIDN’T KILL MY FRIEND!”

“Who are you trying to convince, love?”

His laugh again. The situation was delighting to him. She was at the mercy of anyone passing by, and she was lucky enough to just have him for company. Him, the ghost from her past. The ghost of another friend she killed. With someone else’s hand. As usual.

“In the end, you’ve done it. You’ve become death. You’ve become **_me_**.”

For a moment, she was taken back to Gallifrey, taken back to the Citadel. She was facing him on the sort of podium where he had held her prisoner for hours, and he was standing there, surrounding his abominable creations. The TCE filled with Death Particle in hand, and him looking fiercely in the eyes, pushing her to commit yet another crime. She had been the better man… woman… whatever. There she was now. She really should have pressed that button. How many times had that thought tickle her mind already?

“Have you ever been blackmailed? That looks like blackmail. There is a witness and they know where you are. Now, what are you gonna do? Give in to the demands of some random human? Run and hide? You’re particularly good at that. Always have been. Always putting the blame on others for your mistakes.”

“I’m gonna do the right thing for once.”

“Oh. You have me curious.”

“Do the wise choice: surrender.”

It was an answer he clearly hadn’t seen coming as his raised eyebrow told her. Scorn was clear on his face, scorn for being the witness of such a pathetic choice, but she was done running and hiding. She had no one and nothing left. She had lost her mind. So she would assume her responsibilities and face justice, and maybe be sent back to that cell millions of lightyears away. No one would care if she lost her mind there. The perfect place to disappear completely and let the universe heal…


End file.
